Category: Power BI

Chris Webb illuminates us:

One of the most common questions I get asked is “How can I use Power BI in DirectQuery mode on top of a REST API?”. This seems like a reasonable thing to do but almost everyone who tries it will fail, and in this post I will explain why.

To answer this question we first of all have to review the two main ways of working with data in Power BI: Import mode and DirectQuery mode. In Import mode data is cached in Power BI’s own internal database and all the DAX queries that are generated by your reports are answered from there. In DirectQuery mode no data is stored inside Power BI; instead, when a report is run and DAX queries are fired off against your dataset, Power BI in turn generates queries against the data source to get the data needed. Most of the data sources that can be used with DirectQuery mode in Power BI are relational databases and so that means Power BI will generate SQL queries to get data from them, but Power BI can also generate queries in other languages too.

Read on for the bad news, although there are some third-party products which can make it work in specific cases.

Imran Burki builds a chart:

Last week we built a Manufacturing Yield dashboard that showed first and final pass yield numbers. In this post, we’re going to introduce the concept of manufacturing defects and build a Pareto chart in Power BI. Unlike Excel, the Pareto chart isn’t out-of-the-box in Power BI. Instead, we must create DAX to build the Pareto. Before we dig into the DAX, let’s talk about why we would create a Pareto in the context of manufacturing and why defects are important to track.

Read on to learn what a Pareto chart is and how you can build the DAX function which gives us the relevant information.

Jon Fletcher shows how to disable query processing in Power Query:

In Power BI Power Query there is an option to enable or disable whether a table is loaded into the report. The option ‘Enable load’ can be found by right clicking on the table. Typically, by default, the load is already enabled.

Click through to see how you can disable query processing or remove a particular query from report refreshes.

Chris Webb shows how you can improve dataflow performance in Power BI after switching to a Premium Per User model:

Over the years I have written a lot about Power BI/Power Query performance but it has always been in the context of loading data direct into datasets, not dataflows. A lot of cool things have been happening in dataflows recently, though, and now that Premium Per User has made Premium features to a much wider audience I thought it would be interesting to look at an example of how PPU can help dataflow performance and specifically how and when the Enhanced Compute Engine can make dataflow refresh faster.

Click through for some interesting findings.

Marc Lelijveld takes us through the benefits and challenges of drilling through to a different report in Power BI:

It is very common to have multiple reports for different audiences, while there is also one (group of) user(s) that requires to have an overview over all these different insights. The main challenge you will face, is having cross-report interactivity and find related insights.

Let’s take an example of three different roles, where we have a customer account manager, reseller manager and a regional manager. Of course, they should have the same single source of truth, but there is one thing you want to avoid as report creator! You do not want to create three different report for the three mentioned audiences. But as they have different roles and responsibilities, you do not want them to see each other’s data and keep it clean and simple! In this blog I will describe how you can setup cross-report drill through to jump from one report to another, while respecting applied filters and avoiding building three separate reports!

Click through for the process, as well as potential issues you may hit along the way.