A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Another important aspect when having datasets is being able to log and monitor performance. In this blog post I am going to compare the logging between Azure Analysis Services (AAS) and Power BI Premium Per User (PPU).
With the recent release of PPU having integration with Log Analytics it makes it a lot easier to compare the logging options between AAS and PPU.
This is an area where there’s still a bit of a gap. Click through to see what the differences look like today.
Comments closedSabrina Jordan has a clever solution to a common customer request:
How many times have you struggled to find the happy medium between a report that looks phenomenal when printed, but has everything a user might need in an Excel export? I recently built a beautiful paginated report with groupings separated by white space for easy readability – but the user wanted to export the results to Excel, and the format prevented them from sorting or filtering the report contents. Power BI Report Builder has a couple features that can allow you the best of both worlds, with a few simple tricks. By the end of this tutorial, you will have created two Tablix, set up conditional visibility based on report render format, and set conditional sizing on the Excel Tablix (using hidden charts!) to prevent blank pages.
Click through for the solution.
Comments closedPaul Turley begins a new series:
It occurred to me that we have put so much effort into promoting best practices and proper design that there is far less information about how to create bad reports and data models. In that light, the purpose of this article is to talk about what to do if you want things to go poorly and make sure your projects fail – if not immediately, then sometime in the future – and if not for you then for whoever inherits the work that you have done.
I welcome your comments and thoughts about the worst practices you have seen in Power BI. Post your ideas in the comments below. What examples have you encountered of sure-fire ways to make projects go badly?
Paul has six starter anti-patterns; click through for the set.
Comments closedMarco Russo and Alberto Ferrari lay out a challenge:
Tabular offers the built-in feature of hiding rows of data from specific users. For example, you can create a set of security rules to let a store manager see only the sales of their store. This works fine if your goal is to secure data, which means preventing access to data that a user is not expected to see.
Another common requirement is to be able to select by default, for a store manager, their sales. With that said, store managers can see the data of other stores, but they need to explicitly request it. In other words: by default, the store manager sees the sales of their store only. By using a slicer, they can choose a different combination of stores.
Read on for the solution, but be sure to read the warnings Marco and Alberto include near the end of the article.
Comments closedPaul Turley answers a question:
This question comes up every few years in SQL Server Reporting Services. Of course, in Power BI Paginated Reports, we have the same features. A couple of days ago, Karthik posted this question as a comment to my post titled Chapter 7 – Advanced Report Design:
I am working on a SSRS report where the grouping is done to group the records in to multiple tabs/worksheets. When the report is exported to excel, the worksheets has the default name (Sheet1, Sheet2, Sheet3,…). Here I want to override the default worksheet name with (Tab1, Tab2, Tab3, …). The number of tabs/worksheets varies each time depending on the parameter selection by the user. How to address this? any suggestions please.
Click through for the answer.
Comments closedEmanuele Meazzo shows us the power of configuration:
With the end of the IE support for Power Bi (and in general tbh), companies are scrambling finally to move their users from the legacy browser to modern ones; it was about time if you ask me.
However, there’s an edge case where using anything but IE is not as straightforward as it could be; in my case Power Bi RS worked fine for any report in any browser, except with direct query reports that were set up to authenticate via Windows Authentication as the user viewing the report:
Read on to see how to fix this so that it works well in browsers like Edge and Chrome.
Comments closedMatt Allington answers a question:
This is a follow up article from my last blog post where I demonstrated how easy it is to use two slicers to compare any two items. In the demo in my article, I specifically showed how you could compare any 2 years of choice, but the principle applies to any two products, any two customers, or any two of anything. At the bottom of that article, there was a comment from Artur asking if there was a way to limit the choices in the comparison slicer to exclude the item selected in the first slicer. E.g.
If I select Year = 2016 in slicer 1 below, then I don’t want to see Year = 2016 in the comparison slicer 2 below. I thought that was a great question/suggestion and hence that is the topic for today.
Click through for the video in which Matt answers the question.
Comments closedMeagan Longoria wants to calculate age:
In week 26 of Workout Wednesday for Power BI, I asked people to calculate the age of Nobel laureates at the time they received the award. I provided some logic, but I didn’t prescribe how to create the age calculation. This inspired a couple of questions and a round of data validation as calculating age may be trickier than you think. In this post, I’ll explore some of the ways people have calculated age in Power BI and the edge cases where those calculations may not work.
In my solution video for Workout Wednesday, I used Power Query to calculate age. This was inspired by several blog posts and videos I had seen previously.
This turns out to be a much trickier problem than it first appears.
Comments closedChris Webb wants to figure out why the first partition is so special:
It’s a visualisation from a report created by my colleague Phil Seamark (as detailed in this blog post) showing how long all the partitions in a dataset take to refresh. If you look at these visualisations you’ll probably ask the same question I did: why does the first partition always start before the others?
Click through for the answer.
Comments closedMelissa Coates has a new document:
For the most part it’s targeted to orgs who have Power BI deployed to a certain extent, yet know there’s room for improvement. We focus mostly on the harder things that are more difficult to manage than the technology itself.
Although I did the writing and diagram creation, I did so with Matthew Roche’s direction, advice, and guidance. That man is a wealth of knowledge. If you’re reading this post, then you’re probably familiar with his series on building a data culture. If you haven’t reviewed that series thoroughly, please do. You’ll recognize a lot of common themes from his content in this new adoption roadmap.
Click through for some Q&A and information on where you can get the roadmap.
Comments closed