A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Wolfgang Strasser points out a new feature with Azure Synapse Analytics:
Let’s call it by accident, that I found out that Azure Synapse Analytics now let’s you to link more than just one Power BI workspace.. There is an entry in the Release notes/Update menu that lists this option.
Read on to see what this means for you.
Comments closedChris Webb shows how we can optimize the number of evaluation containers in Power BI:
Last week I showed how the new MaxEvaluationWorkingSetInMB registry setting could increase the performance of memory-hungry Power Query queries in Power BI Desktop. In this post I’ll show how the other new registry setting, ForegroundEvaluationContainerCount, can also help performance. Before I carry on I recommend you read the documentation on these new registry settings if you haven’t done so already.
To illustrate the effect of this setting I created ten identical Power Query queries feeding an Import mode dataset in a new .pbix file, each of which read data from the same 150MB CSV file, apply the a filter and then count the number of rows returned.
I don’t think I like having to modify a registry setting each time; that’s leading me to believe I should rarely (or never) mess with this.
Comments closedAdam Aspin takes us through creating Power BI themes:
Power BI has taken the world by storm when it comes to creating attention-grabbing dashboards that empower users. It has come to dominate the analytics arena with its ease of use, wide range of connectivity options, and the variety of available visuals. However, formatting (and reformatting) dashboard visuals can prove time-consuming and repetitive – as can standardizing the presentation of multiple dashboards to create a unified look and feel for a suite of reports. Most users would rather spend their time analyzing and delivering meaningful insights as opposed to applying colors and font choices to charts and tables. This article explains how Power BI themes can avoid that tedious work!
This is where the creation and application of Power BI themes comes in. A theme is a standardized definition of some – or all – of the formatting of a dashboard. This can range from defining a color palette and a selection of font choices to the detailed specification of each and every visual. Applying a theme allows you to format virtually every visual in a dashboard instantly. What is more, any changes that you subsequently make to a theme can be reapplied in a few clicks to update your dashboard’s presentation. Themes can be created once, then applied to dozens or even hundreds of Power BI dashboards to guarantee a coherent and rigorously standardized presentation style across a department or even an entire organization.
Read on to see some of the things you can do with customizing Power BI.
Comments closedChris Webb ties a new Visio announcement to Power BI:
There was an interesting announcement today regarding Visio:
In summary there will soon be a lightweight, web-based version of Visio available to anyone with a Microsoft 365 Business, Office 365 E1/E3/E5, F3, A1, A3 or A5 subscription. Previously Visio was not part of the main M365 plans and was only available as a separate purchase.
So what? As a Power BI user, why should I care?
Read on for Chris’s answer. If the web-based version of Visio is good, I’m reasonably excited by this prospect.
Comments closedTreb Gatte continues a series on Power BI Goals:
Power BI Goals enables you to present the status of a key outcome that can optionally be tied to data. Treating Power BI Goals as a glorified hierarchy of metrics may lead you to miss a more valuable use value of Goals.
Note, Goals do not roll up. The hierarchy is there to provide a context for the goal and subordinate goals. If you need data rollup, you may want to look at alternatives.
Part 4 of our blog series covers the ability to support OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) with Power BI Goals. OKRs are a very powerful mechanism for remote workers to stay in sync and focused on the most important work.
Read the whole thing.
Comments closedPower BI aggregations are meant to speed up queries to large DirectQuery tables, as a DBA would create summarized tables to speed up queries to large tables. The most appealing aspect of telling Power BI about these aggregations is that Power BI will automatically redirect the query to the aggregation cache if it determines that its dimensionality matches the dimensionality of the aggregated table, as explained in the documentation. However, there are a couple of limitations worth emphasizing that will prevent this from happening:
Click through for those limitations and what Teo & co did to move forward despite them.
Comments closedPatrick LeBlanc talks about cascading slicers in Power BI:
Trying to get your slicers to filter right in Power BI? Patrick looks at some do’s and don’ts with cascading slicers to get you in the right spot.
Patrick starts with the bad method but then moves to better options, especially “The Alberto.”
Comments closedAlberto Ferrari dives into a DAX operator:
If you like to follow best practices, you can just read this paragraph out of the entire article. If you are using SUMMARIZE to calculate new columns, stop. Seriously, stop doing it. Right now. Open your existing DAX code, search for SUMMARIZE and if you find that you are using SUMMARIZE to compute new columns, add them instead by using ADDCOLUMNS.
At SQLBI we are so strong on this position that we deliberately omitted a part of the detailed description of the behavior of SUMMARIZE in our book. We understand how SUMMARIZE works but we do not want your code to return inaccurate results, just because you use a function without understanding when its result might be different from the result you expected.
Read on as Alberto explains why, as well as the details of SUMMARIZE and how easily you can find yourself in a mess with it.
Matt Allington reviews a paid product:
Tabular Editor is a Power BI Tabular Modelling productivity tool developed by Daniel Otykier. I blogged about Version 2 of the Tabular Editor in this article here. The 3rd edition of Tabular Editor has just been released, and it is a major upgrade from version 2. TE 3 is not free, but in my view, the productivity benefits make it a must have piece of software for anyone that is regularly writing DAX in Power BI Desktop.
Read on for the review.
Comments closedMarc Lelijveld shows how you can combine Power BI deployment pipelines with Azure DevOps:
Looking at the Power BI release plan, dataflow support for Deployment Pipelines is coming up shortly! Currently it is scheduled for June 2021 to reach the public preview state. Versioning and DevOps integration go hand-in-hand to our opinion. With Azure DevOps Git integration, we can overcome the versioning challenge while integrating with Azure DevOps at the same time, as described in the previous blog in 2019. Today, we release a new version of the DevOps implementation which uses native Power BI functionality. Stay tuned!
As we really like the metadata deployment and the ease of setup a pipeline in the Power BI Service, Ton and I decided to setup an Azure DevOps extension based on the recently released Power BI REST APIs for Deployment Pipelines. Although Microsoft promised to come-up with a native DevOps extension over time, we decided to go for it. Time to bridge the gap!
Read on for more details.
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