All about Power BI, Modelling, DAX and Microsoft BI
With the release of the July 2020 version of Power BI desktop we can create tools that can interreact with the Power BI Desktop model directly using an external tool. With this interaction you can make changes to the model in a programmatic way. There are so opportunities things this will open up. You can think of a tool that would allow you to edit the model like Tabular Editor or query like DAX Studio... Read more
Calculation groups are one the most exciting features in some time. At the time of writing there are no tools built into Power BI to create them though. You can add them programmatically though. To add them I wanted to play around with the tabular object model but more on this project later 🙂 . Unfortunately, there was not much documentation available on how to add calculation groups using TOM. Luckily, I have short access... Read more
One thing that has come up several times in the last few weeks is a misconception that you cannot process multiple partitions on the same table or tables in parallel as it would cause a lock. This could be true if you try to do the parallelism yourself. Like in SQL Server you need to think about transactions, the AS engine is a transactional system too. So, the AS engine is definitely capable of loading... Read more
One question that comes up regularly is how to point an existing report to a new dataset. There are quite a few reasons why you might need this. You might want to disconnect report editing from dataset editing and have a separate PBIX for both. Or your company decided to move from AAS to Power BI. They could have decided to go on prem AS to AAS or Power BI. The way to re-point the... Read more
One request that comes up a lot is to be able to provide translations for the tables and columns of your model (especially here in Europe). Up until now this was not possible in Power BI as there was no UI for it. The new XMLA read/write feature changed all of this. As you probably know in SSAS Tabular this is already possible. The new XMLA endpoint makes any Power BI dataset into a SSAS... Read more
A quick post today. Sometimes you will be mystified why your aggregations are not getting hit. There is no clear-cut answer to why. The best way to find the underlying cause of this is to debug it. Our friends at DAX Studio have made this quite easy 🙂 so let’s dive in. I have a model with Sales and a Sales aggregation table: I have set up aggregations to be used. Now to test if... Read more
I recently on some internal email by the developers where they mentioned something, offhand, what I think is amazing :). It will allow you to add measures by copy and pasting and many more quick updates through text. Best of all it turns out there is a straightforward way to change the script in your Power BI file by hand. At this moment this is still in preview and not documented so your mileage might... Read more
One of the cool things of calculation groups is they cannot just be used to apply a calculation over your “base measure” but also apply a dynamic formatstring. You could do this without calculation groups before too as I described here. This method had one big drawback though, it uses the FORMAT function and when doing that all results are transformed into strings. This does help in showing the right format, but you lose a... Read more