Posted on Power BI

Refresh the table fully after setting up incremental refresh with TMSL

I have seen this question a few times. When incremental refresh is setup, we cannot refresh the whole model. Some workarounds are deploying the model again but that is not the best solution. There is a way if your model is running on a XMLA enabled capacity. You can send a TMSL command with our without incremental refresh. With Incremental refresh it looks like this: This will allow you to say which table needs to... Read more

Posted on Power BI

Hardcoding a calculation group in a measure

AS we have seen calculation groups are great :). It offers amazing flexibility and is extremely easy to maintain. But sometimes it doesn’t do what you want due the limitations of the visuals. Let’s say I want to have a visual that shows me the sales of current year and sales Previous year on different axis (let’s say as line). You would create something like the visual below where you want to use the same... Read more

Posted on Analysis Services Power BI

Calculation group TMSL example

Initially I provided a TOM sample to create a calculation group, but you can also interact with the Tabular engine through TMSL using for example management studio. So here is code snippet you can run in your management studio that points to either AS or your internal Power BI desktop file. Make sure you set the compatibility level to at least 1500 and set DiscourageImplicitMeasures to true. This you can do by scripting out the... Read more

Posted on Power BI

Creating a Time intelligence “External Tools” app for Power BI Desktop

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

Posted on Power BI

Adding Calculation Groups using the Tabular Object Model.

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

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Processing partitions \ tables in parallel

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

Posted on Power BI

How to point existing reports to a new dataset in Power BI (even from AAS)

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

Posted on Power BI

Setting up translations for datasets in Power BI premium

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