Category: Power BI

Chris Webb takes a look at three new features in Power BI:

There were a couple of new features and enhancements to existing features in the June 2021 Power BI Desktop release that don’t seem to have much to do with each other but which I think can be combined to do cool things. They are:

1. The new paginated report visual
2. Native SQL support in the Snowflake connector
3. Improvements to dynamic M parameters

Let me give you an example of what I mean…

Click through to see how all of these might fit together.

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Matt Allington has a video:

The whole concept here is to allow a user to pick two things from a list and compare them with each other. For example, compare

– Any year with any other year
– Any product against any other product (maybe even a group of products, using multi select)
– Snapshots (eg different versions of a financial forecast) with any other version
– Etc

What is possible is endless, and the good news is that it is pretty simple to do this in Power BI. Check out my video below to see how I did it.

Click through for the video.

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Chris Webb pushes the “go faster” button:

In this case I started the refresh from the Power BI portal so the default parallelism settings were used. The y axis on this graph shows there were six processing slots available, which means that six objects could be refreshed in parallel – and because there are nine partitions in the only table in the dataset, this in turn meant that some slots had to refresh two partitions. Overall the dataset took 33 seconds to refresh.

However, if you connect from SQL Server Management Studio to the dataset via the workspace’s XMLA Endpoint (it’s very similar to how you connect Profiler, something I blogged about here) you can construct a TMSL script to refresh these partitions with more parallelism. 

Read on to see how you can do this, as well as the net improvement.

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Imke Feldmann introduces a new version of the Power BI Cleaner:

Today I’m very excited to share with you my first version of a complete rework of my Power BI Cleaner tool. It is way faster the the initial version, overcomes some bugs and limitations of the old version and doesn’t require creating additional vpax files.

On top of that, I’ve created an Excel-version, that adds some very convenient additional features: The option to analyze thin reports and to generate scripts that delete unused measures and hides unused columns automatically.

Click through for instructions on how it all works.

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Gilbert Quevauvilliers continues a series on migrating from Azure Analysis Services to Power BI Premium Per User:

Welcome to the fourth instalment of my series on migrating AAS to PPU.

In this blog post I am going to cover the differences, and pros and cons to incremental refreshing when migrating from AAS to PPU.

The reason for incremental refreshing is that I do not have to reload the entire fact table every day when new data arrives.

This also allows for new data to be updated quicker.

And finally, it also uses less resources (memory and CPU) when refreshing the datasets.

Read on to see how it works in both platforms.

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Nick Edwards shows us the way:

Have you ever wanted to export a table from Power BI Desktop into Excel just to make sure the DAX you’ve written is performing as expected but ran into this error message: “Data exceeds the limit – Your data is too large. Some data sampling may occur”?

Most probably this has occurred because you’ve got more than 30,000 rows of data in your table that you’re trying to export. In the example shown below I’ve actually got 30,001 rows of data – a row containing column headers plus 30,000 rows of actual data.

Click through to see how you can get around this limitation.

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