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Category: Power BI

Data Modeling Essentials in Power BI

Published 2020-12-28 by Kevin Feasel

Paul Turley continues a series on doing Power BI the right way:

One of the most important lessons I have learned about data modeling over the past 20+ years is that there isn’t one model that fits all business needs. However, there are simple patterns we can follow to model data according to different business needs. Each pattern or schema has a different set of rules. At a very high level, we can think of these schemas in three different categories.

This is the 101 level course, but it’s good to get a refresher on the fundamentals before jumping into the complicated part.

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Integrating Power BI with Azure Synapse Analytics

Published 2020-12-23 by Kevin Feasel

Santosh Balasubramanian walks us through the process of querying Azure Synapse Analytics data with Power BI:

In this guide, you will be integrating an already-existing Power BI workspace with Azure Synapse Analytics so that you can quickly access datasets, edit reports directly in the Synapse Studio, and automatically see updates to the report in the Power BI workspace. We will be using a Power BI report developed using the Movie Analytics dataset of the previous guide to show the functionalities of the Power BI integration in Azure Synapse.

Click through for the demo.

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Multiple Slicers and AND Logic

Published 2020-12-22 by Kevin Feasel

Stephanie Bruno embraces the healing power of AND:

When using slicers in Power BI reports, multiple selections filter data with OR logic. For example, if you have a slicer with products and your visuals are displaying total number of invoices, then when “bicycles” and “helmets” are selected in the products slicer your visual will show the number of invoices that include bicycles OR helmets. But what if you need to have it instead only show the number of invoices that include bicycles AND helmets? Read on to find out how you can do just that with DAX.

Read on for the solution.

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Small Multiples in Power BI

Published 2020-12-21 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb takes us through a new feature in Power BI:

While the long-awaited small multiples feature that previewed in the December 2020 release is an obvious boost to Power BI’s data visualisation capabilities, did you know that you can use it to improve report performance too?

Earlier this year I wrote blog posts showing how you can improve report performance by showing the same amount of data in fewer visuals (for example by replacing several cards with a single table) and how the number of visuals on a page affects report performance even if they aren’t displaying any data; several other people have written similar posts too. Small multiples are just another way you can replace several visuals with a single visual that displays the same data.

I liked this feature for the visualization improvements, but if you can throw in performance improvements as well, I’m sold.

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The Importance of Composite Models

Published 2020-12-21 by Kevin Feasel

Paul Turley lays out the significance of composite models in Power BI:

There are been many attempts by Microsoft and other vendors to create a data modelling architecture that provides for fast access to cached data, direct access to live data and scaled-out connections to established data models. Remember ROLAP and HOLAP storage in multidimensional cubes? These were great concepts with significant trade-off limitations. No other vendor has anything like this. Way back in the day, Microsoft jumped on the Ralph Kimball bandwagon to promote the idea that a company should have a “one version of the truth” exposed through their data warehouse and cubes or semantic data models. They met customer demand and gave us a BI tool that, in order to bring data together from multiple sources, makes it easy to create a lot of data silos. Arguably, there are design patterns to minimize data duplication but to use governed datasets, self-service report designers are limited to connecting to large, central models that might only be authored and managed by IT. This new feature can restore balance to the force and bring us back to “one version of the truth” again.

Read on for Paul’s early thoughts on the feature.

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Power BI Composite Model Update

Published 2020-12-18 by Kevin Feasel

Matt Allington is excited:

The December 2020 version of Power BI desktop has just been released, and it is undoubtably the most important release since the first version way back in 2015. The super feature that has been released is an update to composite models using direct query of online datasets. The implications of this release are massive. Anyone with Power BI Desktop can now build their own, local version of a data model and enhance it with their own additional data without the need to have edit access to original data model. Oh, and it is a Pro feature, not a Premium feature!

Read on to see this in action.

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Power BI Model Documenter

Published 2020-12-17 by Kevin Feasel

Marc Lelijveld has an update for us:

First of all, I worked on the cleanness of my code. As I’m not a native developer, I have to do a lot of trial and error to get stuff working exactly as I have it in mind. As of the beginning, the script contains a task to create the drop off folder for the connection file. Though, if the folder already existed, the script wrote an error to the screen, while everything was actually going as planned. In v1.2.0 of the model documenter, I enhanced the error handling to only write errors to the screen that actually matter.

Secondly, the transcript that runs while the tool is executed, generates a log file. This log file was not always entirely complete. I further enhanced the logging to easier debug in case of undesirable errors.

There are more improvements as well, so check it out.

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Setting up Azure Purview for Power BI

Published 2020-12-10 by Kevin Feasel

Soheil Bakhshi has a great step-by-step walkthrough for setting up Azure Purview:

Microsoft newly announced a piece of very exciting news that Azure Purview now supports Power BI. This is massive news from a data governance point of view. Azure Purview is the next generation of Azure Data Catalog with more metadata discovery power and the ability to use sensitivity labels. After reading the news, I immediately decided to set up my test environment and give it a go. I followed the steps mentioned in this article on the Microsoft documentation website but I faced some difficulties to get it to work. And here we are, another blog post to help you to set up the Azure Purview for Power BI.

Click through for a detailed walkthrough.

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Switching Between Dates with Calculation Groups

Published 2020-12-08 by Kevin Feasel

Alberto Ferrari has another good use for calculation groups:

This technique works just fine; it has the disadvantage of creating many measures, one for each combination of relationship to activate and base measure. Another solution is to create a calculation group that changes the active relationship of the selected measure. Doing this, you create one calculation item for each relationship and the user chooses the relationship to activate using a slicer or a report filter.

But read on for the calculation group solution, which is a clever way of deferring which relationship you care about until the user selects it.

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