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Category: Power BI

Monitoring Power BI

Published 2020-05-19 by Kevin Feasel

James Serra gives us a few options to monitor different aspects of Power BI:

Performance analyzer: Find out how each of your report elements, such as visuals and DAX formulas, are performing. Using the Performance Analyzer, you can see and record logs that measure how each of your report elements performs when users interact with them, and which aspects of their performance are most (or least) resource intensive. This is accomplished by clicking a “Start recording” button and interacting with the elements you want to test. More info at Use Performance Analyzer to examine report element performance.

Click through for several other tools, which you can combine to get a better feel for how your environment is doing.

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Expression-Based Formatting in DAX

Published 2020-05-18 by Kevin Feasel

Matt Allington points out a new look to a slightly less new feature:

When I say “new”, they are actually not new – this feature has actually been around since the start of 2019. What is “new” is the discoverability of the feature. Prior to the April 2020 release, you had to first hover your mouse button over the section (Title text in the example above). After you hovered your mouse, you would see a vertical … menu (kind of like a vertical ellipsis), then when you hovered over the vertical ellipsis, you would then see the Fx button. Click the mysterious hidden button and only then could you discover the world of expression based formatting.

Click through to learn about expression-based formatting and where it might be useful.

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Speeding Up Pivot Operations in Power Query

Published 2020-05-18 by Kevin Feasel

Imke Feldmann has a few tricks for making pivot operations in Power Query faster:

Pivot operations in are a very handy feature in  Power Query but they can slow down refresh performance. So with some bittersweet pleasure I can tell that I found a trick to speed them up. The sweetness comes from the fact that the performance improvement is very significant. But the bitterness comes from the fact that I could have used this for almost 4 years now, but was too blind to realize at the time when I first worked with the code.

Read the whole thing and learn why Imke is disappointed in not knowing this four years ago.

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Separating Reports from Datasets in Power BI

Published 2020-05-18 by Kevin Feasel

Melissa Coates has a video and an article for us:

Including documentation alongside the dataset is helpful for teammates who might need to work on this dataset at some point, or even for yourself in the future. It also means you won’t have an empty report, and you won’t need to delete the empty report once the file is published to the service.

Click through for plenty of useful information on the why and how, as well as what to watch out for.

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Paging in Power Query

Published 2020-05-15 by Kevin Feasel

Imke Feldmann explains how you can perform paging with Power Query:

When you use an API with a paging mechanism (like the example from this blogpost), you’ll might work with a field that contains the address for the next page. You can use this to walk through the available chunks until you reach the last element. That last element in the pagination will not contain a next-field or that field will be null.

There is a bit of nuance to this, so click through and learn how.

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Showing Images in Power BI

Published 2020-05-12 by Kevin Feasel

Teo Lachev hits on an annoyance I have with Power BI:

The Power BI image-rendering visualizations, such as Table or Card, expect image links to public servers hosting the images with anonymous permissions. This has obvious shortcomings. Can we load images from a database or Power BI data table? You bet, as Jason Thomas has demonstrated a long time ago. Here are the steps I followed to show the images from the Production.ProductPhoto table in the AdventureWorks2012 (or later) database. If you want to embed a few images into a Power BI data table (instead of an external database), you can convert them manually to Base64 using any of the online image converters, such as https://codebeautify.org/image-to-base64-converter and embed the resulting string into a Power BI data table (the Enter Data feature). Gerhard Brueckl takes this one step further by showing you how to automate the base64 conversion with many images.

The experience for displaying images isn’t the worst—I don’t mind needing base64 encoded strings for images—but there’s a strict limit on how large your images can be, and that size is puny. I have one dashboard where I show a CPU chart from Grafana and I have to leave it at a very small resolution or else I don’t get to see the whole chart—it cuts off in the middle.

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Monitoring Azure Synapse Analytics SQL Pools with Power BI

Published 2020-05-12 by Kevin Feasel

Brett Powell has a pair of Power BI templates for monitoring Azure Synapse Analytics:

Upon clicking ‘Load’ you’ll either need to provide your credentials for this source (if you don’t have this data source saved from previous use) or the queries will execute and the following report pages will be available:

– Executions
– Waits
– Sessions
– Waits Detail
– Execution Detail
– Memory
– ExecutionDrillThrough (hidden)

Click through to see what the templates look like and how to obtain them.

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Bookmarks or Page Navigation for Power BI

Published 2020-05-12 by Kevin Feasel

Prathy Kamasani embraces the power of “and”:

Power BI Bookmarks, the secret behind many sleek reports, It revolutionised the entire PBI Report design approach. Initially, Bookmarks were portrayed more as some saved views, which can be used for storytelling than for navigation. However, we certainly saw more report designers using Bookmarks for navigation than for storytelling. In March 2020, we have a new functionality called Page navigation,  which brings us to the dilemma of which one to use and when?

Read on for the comparison.

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Using Postman with Power BI’s REST API

Published 2020-05-11 by Kevin Feasel

David Eldersveld takes us through the Power BI REST API:

Postman is a valuable tool to work with APIs, especially when testing and making ad hoc requests outside of an automated production solution. In terms of where a Power BI developer may find Postman useful, it sits somewhere between the documentation’s “Try It” functionality and a more production-worthy solution incorporating tools like Azure DevOps, Logic Apps/Power Automate, a Power BI custom connector, etc.

The ideas in this post extend an original post from Carl de Souza. Carl shows how to obtain an OAuth2 access token but does so with hardcoded values. Additional API requests use the token from the original response, but he also manually provides this token to those subsequent API calls.

David has a clever technique for getting the bearer token, so check it out.

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Optimizing Slow Card Visuals in Power BI

Published 2020-05-06 by Kevin Feasel

Marco Russo helps us tune Power BI reports containing a large number of card visuals:

Every visual element in a Power BI report must complete a number of tasks to provide the expected result. Visuals showing data must generate one or more DAX queries to retrieve the required measures applying the correct filters. The execution of these queries increases the waiting time for the end user, and increase the workload on the server, especially when multiple users access a published report at the same time. In order to improve the performance and the scalability of a report, the best practice is reducing the number of visuals consuming data published in a page of a report.

The focus is on a single page of the report. Power BI only gets data and build the visualizations required for the active page of a report. When the user switches the focus to a different page, the waiting time only depends on the visuals of the new page. The content of other pages of the same report is not relevant for the performance. The goal is reducing the number of visuals in a single page of a report. This could be challenging in order to obtain the same report layout, but we can look for the right visualization once we realize that the number of visuals in the same page is negatively affecting the user experience.

Less is more here.

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