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Category: Power BI

Loading Data into Power BI Premium Per User vs Azure Analysis Services

Published 2021-06-16 by Kevin Feasel

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

I have been working with a customer where I have got data in AAS and in PPU for the same dataset.

What I have found is that when the data is loading it is very similar in terms of how long the data takes to load.

With one of my customers as an example the data was being curated in Asia, whilst the business was running things from Australia. By hosting AAS/PPU where the data was curated meant that the data loading was significantly faster. Yes while the reports would have to access the data across the ocean, this only sends the results, so the performance of the reports was and is still blazingly fast!

Click through for the full story.

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Embedding Power BI into Jupyter Notebooks

Published 2021-06-15 by Kevin Feasel

Dennes Torres takes a look at a new Power BI feature:

Microsoft recently announced the ability to include Power BI reports inside Jupyter notebooks. After overcoming the dazzle of this exciting feature, what comes to my mind is: “Why do we need this?”

I’m far from being a Jupyter notebook expert, but as far as I know, they are used for interactive analysis. Why, in the middle of an interactive analysis, would I need to get a Power BI Report?

Even if the Power BI Report is not exactly what I need, I could continue the analysis in Power BI. Why should I move it to Jupyter and make this kind of integration with an existing report?

Read on to see what you can do with it. As far as how you might be able to use it, that remains an open question.

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Changing Power BI Evaluation Container Numbers

Published 2021-06-14 by Kevin Feasel

Chris 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.

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Creating Power BI Themes

Published 2021-06-14 by Kevin Feasel

Adam 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.

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Visio Licensing Changes and Power BI

Published 2021-06-11 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb ties a new Visio announcement to Power BI:

There was an interesting announcement today regarding Visio:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2021/06/09/bringing-visio-to-microsoft-365-diagramming-for-everyone/

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.

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Limitations in Power BI Aggregations

Published 2021-06-10 by Kevin Feasel

Teo Lachev looks at a couple of limitations in Power BI aggregations, as well as workarounds for those limitations:

Power 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.

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Clarifying Confusion around Power BI Goals

Published 2021-06-10 by Kevin Feasel

Treb 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.

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Understanding SUMMARIZE in DAX

Published 2021-06-08 by Kevin Feasel

Alberto 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.

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