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Category: Power BI

Validating Data Model Results in Power BI

Published 2020-10-12 by Kevin Feasel

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

When designing a new data model, this is typically the first thing I do… For every fact table and for each large dimension table, I create a measure that returns the record count for that table. Users normally think about their data in business terms (like sums, ratios and averages) and not about how many records there are in a table. Record counts are a convenient sanity check for record completeness and distribution across groups; and may also be a good indicator for model size and performance.

Paul takes several passes at the problem, getting a bit deeper into it each time.

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The Power BI Release Plan

Published 2020-10-12 by Kevin Feasel

Matthew Roche clues us in on what’s coming for Power BI:

The Power BI team at Microsoft publishes a “release plan,” which is essentially the public product roadmap. Anyone can use it to understand what new capabilities and improvements are planned, and when they’re expected to be released.

One challenge with the official release plan comes from the fact that it is a set of online documents, and that for each “release wave” there is a new set of docs – it’s not always clear where to look for the latest information on a given feature.

But thanks to Alex Powers, this is a lot clearer now. Click through to learn how.

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Automating Power BI Report Deployment

Published 2020-10-07 by Kevin Feasel

Martin Schoombee continues a series on Power BI automation:

Deploying the report is seemingly straight-forward, but there are some risks we need to consider:

– What should we do if the report already exists?
– If the dataset exists, what should we do if there are other reports that use this (shared) dataset?

The last item is a bit of an edge-case that we’ll have to dive deeper into, but let’s look at the basic cmdlet first.

Click through to see how, as well as some thoughts on those risks.

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Integrating Power BI into Azure Synapse Analytics

Published 2020-10-06 by Kevin Feasel

Ginger Grant walks us through two methods of integrating Power BI and Azure Synapse Analytics:

From within Synapse you have the ability to access a Power BI workspace so that you can use Power BI from within Synapse.  Your Power BI tenant can be in a different data center than the Azure Synapse Workspace, but they both must be in the same Power BI Tenant.  You can use Power BI to look at any data you wish, as the data you use can be from any location. When this blog was written, it was only possible to connect to one Power BI workspace from within Azure Synapse. In order to run Power BI as shown here, first I needed to create a Linked Service from within Synapse.

Read on for more.

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View Native Analysis Services Queries in Power Query

Published 2020-10-05 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb gives us an update on Power Query:

If you’re familiar with the topic of query folding in Power Query, you’ll know that the View Native Query right-click option in the Applied Steps pane of the Power Query Editor can be used to show the native query that is run against the data source. You may also know that there are some data sources where query folding does take place but where View Native Query remains greyed out.

Read on to see which sources are now available and to see an example of this in action.

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Creating a Power BI Workspace from Powershell

Published 2020-10-02 by Kevin Feasel

Martin Schoombee continues a series on automating Power BI deployments:

There are two things to keep in mind when creating workspaces in an automated fashion:

– The workspace may already exist. When you delete a workspace, it isn’t really deleted…only its status changes to “deleted”. That’s great if you want to restore a workspace you’ve accidentally deleted, but your code will have to account for it or it will fail.
– Whether you are creating or restoring a workspace, you have to provide an account to be the new administrator in the workspace. This ensures that the workspace is accessible, and by design a workspace cannot exist without an administrator.

Read on for the code.

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Refresh a Dataset when Dataflow Refresh Completes

Published 2020-10-02 by Kevin Feasel

Matthew Roche points out an API update:

Back in August I highlighted the new dataflows PowerShell script repo on GitHub. These scripts provide an accelerated starting point to working with the dataflows REST APIs and to automate common dataflows tasks.

This week the dataflows team has released two new REST APIs for managing dataflows transactions (think “refresh”) and a new parameterized PowerShell script to make using the APIs easier.

Read on to see how you can use these new APIs to trigger a dataset refresh once a dataflow refresh has completed.

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Working with Active Power BI Sessions

Published 2020-09-30 by Kevin Feasel

Marc Lelijveld provides us insights:

Getting more insights in the telemetry of your Power BI dataset is always interesting. Especially if you share your Power BI dataset for self-service purposes to build new reports on top of your managed dataset, you might want to know who is actually using in and what queries are they executing against your datasets.

Besides that, there might be a whole lot of other valid use cases where you want to have more insights in currently running sessions on your dataset. An example where I recently ran into, was canceling a Power BI Dataset refresh. As there is no button in the Power BI Service to do this, I had to find a different way to do this.

Read on to see how, using DAX Studio.

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Building a Simple Date Table in Power BI

Published 2020-09-29 by Kevin Feasel

Marco Russo has a simple method for building a date dimension in Power BI:

With the recent introduction of custom format strings in Power BI, we can use a different approach that no longer requires additional columns, and that can also remove the need to use the Sort by Column feature. The basic idea is that we always store a date for a period like Year, Month, or Week. The custom format string displays the text we want to see in the user interface; however, because the underlying data is a number we automatically get the right sort order and the ability to use the Continuous Type in the X-Axis of a line chart.

Read the whole thing.

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Managing Power BI Administrators

Published 2020-09-29 by Kevin Feasel

Melissa Coates has some guidance for us:

The Power BI administrator role is a high-privilege role which should be carefully managed. As with many aspects of administration and governance, this involves having a balance between people being able to get things done and risk of when too many people having elevated permissions.

Click through for the blog post as well as a video.

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