A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Chris Webb shows off a method for handling multi-select using dynamic M parameters:
Even though the documentation for dynamic M parameters does mention how to handle multi-select in the M code for your Power Query queries, I thought it would be useful to provide a detailed example of how to do this and explain what happens behind the scenes when you use multi-select.
Click through for that explanation and example.
Comments closedWolfgang Strasser shows us how to integrate Azure Synapse Analytics and Power BI:
Sometimes however, would not it be nice to access the data lake in Direct Query mode – to get the most up to date information for every report view? I would say: yes … but how can you achieve this? The options natively provided by ADLS Gen2 and Power BI are not sufficient to solve this requirement. But: there are options to achieve this and, in this post, I would like to show you the possibilities using Azure Synapse Analytics to build a query layer on top of a ADLS Gen2 storage account.
Click through for a step-by-step walkthrough.
Comments closedMartin Schoombee continues a series on automating Power BI deployments:
At times you may want to refresh a Power BI dataset from outside the portal, either on-demand or as part of another process (think DevOps for instance). In those cases the API provides the ideal mechanism to do so. Just remember that you are still limited to 8 refreshes a day if you don’t have a Premium workspace, and using this method will not work beyond the number of allowed refreshes. You also cannot count on the API to return a useful error message in that case.
Read on to see how.
Comments closedCurrently the only way to create and or edit the Format String Expression is in Tabular Editor. Whilst I love Tabular Editor it does not have any DAX Intellisense.
I kept on editing the Format String Expression and I honestly must have had to edit it 4 times and it still was wrong.
Below is a quick tip on what I did to make sure my Format String Expression was valid and would indeed work!
Read on to see how.
Comments closedNicky van Vroenhoven shows off #shared:
In addition to what the title suggests, you can not only show all the functions, but all tables, records, (custom) functions and query (results) inside Power Query.
Click through to see how.
Comments closedChris Webb continues along a theme:
Since last week’s blog post about dynamic M parameters generated so much interest, this week I thought I’d give you another example of something cool you can do with them when you’re using Azure Data Explorer (ADX) as a DirectQuery source in Power BI: geospatial analysis.
Let’s say you work for a chain of supermarkets and want to use Power BI see what other competing stores are close to one of your stores.
Read on for the rest of the story.
Comments closedPatrick LeBlanc has a video for us:
Have you struggled to compare data from two different time periods in Power BI? Does the data just continue on and not overlap? Patrick shows you how you can easily overlay the data for comparison.
Click through for the video.
Comments closedGilbert Quevauvilliers shows us how to remove a Power BI On-Premises Gateway from a cluster:
In the past when I had to remove a Power BI Data Gateway from a cluster, I had to use PowerShell with a couple steps which was rather complex.
I recently found out that this can now be easily achieved using the Power BI Admin Centre in the steps below.
Click through for the process.
Comments closedMatt Allington walks us through a complex scenario using the Matrix visual in Power BI:
Not every report you may want to build has such simple layout requirements as the one above. When using an Excel pivot table, there is a feature called “Field, Items and Sets” that makes the process of creating asymmetric pivot tables relatively easy, but that doesn’t exist in Power BI. To help you understand, here is an example of an asymmetric visual (Power BI matrix in this case).
Note in my example above, the first 4 years come from the year column, just like before, but now I have 2 additional columns at the end of the matrix that are not simply the addition of other columns. To create the last 2 columns above I need to write measures, but you can’t have both measures and columns from your model showing like this in a Power BI matrix. Instead you need to build a solution that leverages a separate table to generate the columns you need, and then to generate the results you need in each column.
Below I will show you how to build such an asymmetric matrix like this.
Read on for the solution. This is quite clever but also makes me wonder if the product shouldn’t make this scenario a bit easier for us
Comments closedMartin Schoombee continues a series on automating Power BI deployments:
There’s a few things you need to pay close attention to when setting the refresh schedule via the API:
– Unless you’re setting the refresh schedule for a Premium workspace, you can only refresh a dataset up to 8 times a day. We’re only going to set it to update once a day here, but keep this in mind if you’re planning to adjust the API call to refresh multiple times a day.
– The name of the time zone you provide has to match exactly with the names (middle column) in this reference: Microsoft Time Zone Index
– The refresh time has to be in the format hh:mm, and similar to the options in the Power BI portal you can only refresh on the hour or half-hour.
Read on to see how it works and the API call to make.
Comments closed