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Category: Power BI

Power BI 101

Published 2021-09-30 by Kevin Feasel

Soheil Bakhshi is starting some 101-level training on Power BI:

Many people talk about Power BI, its benefits and common challenges, and many more want to learn Power BI, which is excellent indeed. But there are many misconceptions and misunderstandings amongst the people who think they know Power BI. In my opinion, it is a significant risk in using tools without knowing them, and using the technology is no different. The situation is even worse when people who must know the technology well don’t know it, but they think they do. These people are potential risks to the businesses that want to adopt Power BI as their primary analytical solution across the organisation. As a part of my day-to-day job, I communicate with many people interacting with Power BI. Amongst many knowledgeable users are some of those who confuse things pretty frequently, which indicates a lack of understanding of the basic concepts.
So I decided to write a series of Power BI 101 to explain the basics of the technology that we all love in simple language. Regardless of your usage of Power BI, I endeavour to help you know what to expect from Power BI. This is the first part of this series.

Read on for the start of this series, asking the question “What is Power BI?”

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Excel PivotTable Drillthrough

Published 2021-09-28 by Kevin Feasel

Marco Russo and Alberto Ferrari show how you can control drillthrough when using PivotTables in Excel:

When you double-click on a cell in an Excel PivotTable, you invoke the drillthrough feature of the PivotTable which shows the underlying data for that particular cell. This feature was initially designed for Multidimensional databases in Analysis Services. In a Multidimensional model, it is also possible to add different drillthrough actions that can be activated through the context menu in Excel. While the customization of actions is not feasible for a Tabular model, the drillthrough feature is active by default. It returns all the rows visible through the filter context in the table that includes the measure definition. In many scenarios, this default behavior does not provide a result consistent with the data computed in the result that you see visible. Through the Detail Rows Expression property of a measure in the Tabular model, you can customize the drillthrough behavior in Excel, thus controlling the rows and columns returned to the user.

This article explains how to use the Detail Rows Expression property to customize the Excel drillthrough behavior for a PivotTable connected to a Power BI dataset or an Analysis Services database – they can be identified as Tabular models in the remaining part of this article.

Read on for a demonstration, plenty of explanation, and even some elucidation.

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Choosing between Power BI Pro and Premium

Published 2021-09-24 by Kevin Feasel

Marc Lelijveld has an image for us:

Often I got the question from customers: “Can you assign my workspace to a premium capacity?” But frequently they actually do not really need Power BI Premium. It remains to be a difficult topic to decide whether someone needs Power BI Premium or not. Therefore, I decided to setup a decision tree that helps to decide if you need Power BI Premium or not.

This decision tree highlights a bunch of Premium specific requirements and features like breaking the data size limits, XMLA Endpoints, unlimited content sharing and much more!

Click through to see that decision tree, though note that it does not differentiate between Premium and Premium per User.

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Power BI Data Models with Multiple Aggregation Tables

Published 2021-09-21 by Kevin Feasel

Phil Seamark continues a series on Power BI aggregations:

Why might you consider having more than one aggregation table? The short answer is speed and overall resource efficiency.

Consider a heavily used Power BI report where page-load time is considered critical. A typical report may have half a dozen visuals on a page showing values computed over various grains. If the model used by the report has no aggregation tables, all calculations use the raw fact tables to produce values for each metric.

Adding an aggregation table to the model allows the same calculations as before to use smaller tables to produce the same result. Calculations using smaller aggregation tables will enable the server hosting the data model to use much less effort per query.

It was interesting to see just how easy the process is.

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Remember CPU Time when Optimizing Power BI Premium Reports

Published 2021-09-20 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb has a public service announcement:

When you tune a Power BI report or dataset refresh your first job is to make it run faster – users hate slow reports and late data. However, if you are using Power BI Premium you also need to think about reducing the amount of CPU used by a query or refresh as well, and in this post I’ll explain why.

Click through for that explanation.

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Connecting to Power BI PPU via SQL Server Profiler

Published 2021-09-15 by Kevin Feasel

Gilbert Quevauvilliers wants to use SQL Server Profiler for a good reason:

I was recently looking on how to use SQL Profiler to connect to my Premium Per User (PPU) dataset so that I could see where the processing of my incremental partitions was.

When I first tried to connect using the default options, I got the error “Either the race with the ID of ‘AAA’ does not exist in the server of ID ‘BBB’, or the user does not have permissions to access the object”

This was rather a confusing error and it took me a little while to figure it out.

Click through to see the solution.

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Measure Filters in Power BI

Published 2021-09-14 by Kevin Feasel

Marco Russo and Alberto Ferrari dive into a topic:

The first paragraph of this article needs to be a warning: the article itself is here for DAX and Power BI enthusiasts only. We are going to show a report that does not work, and then we explore how to fix the problem by performing a deep analysis of the queries generated by Power BI, finding the problem, and finally fixing it. The article contains a lot of references to advanced DAX concepts and the final solution is NOT a best practice. The value of the article is not in the specific solution. Rather, the important part is that a deep understanding of DAX and Power BI can help you obtain the right results, specifically when you have the feeling that you are faced with a bug because Power BI is acting strange. If you do not like DAX before reading this article, you will like it even less at the end. But if you love DAX, then chances are you will really enjoy the reading, even though it requires quite a lot of brain bandwidth. For sure, it took all of mine when I first encountered this behavior.

Break out the propeller hats before you dive in.

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