All about Power BI, Modelling, DAX and Microsoft BI
I recently found out the SSAS team added new trace information to Azure Log analytics. The new information allows you to find out the report and dataset in Power BI that generate each query. To show you how this works. I captured the queries in AAS using Azure Log analytics as I described here. I then make sure I add the column ” ApplicationContext_s” using the query below. This will give me the context the query... Read more
The Power BI team recently shipped some cool new flow options and one of them is really cool. Many times I hear of reports and dataset that fully rely on SharePoint lists. These lists are used by business groups that don’t have the rights to spin up and Azure SQL database or just want to keep a simple list to store their dimensions. SharePoint lists are great for that. The new flow option allows you... Read more
I got an interesting question about being able to figure out which measures and columns are being used for all tabular models in a server, either by known reports or by self service users using Power BI. To solve this I decided to use Power BI :). To get the required information I decided to capture and parse the queries being that are being send to AAS and parse the results Power BI desktop over... Read more
This question comes up pretty regularly, I have a big screen in my hallway and I want to show some Power BI reports that rotate. Now there is some build in functionality in the Windows 10 App for Power BI for it that you can check out here. But there have been some cases where this doesn’t work, like for example if you want your report to run outside of your domain using B2B or... Read more
I was having a discussion earlier this week about the use of variables I used in my currency conversion blog post . The question was why I am using 2 different measure to calculate the sales for each currency. So I am using 2 measures together: TrnExchangeRate =MIN ( FactExchangeRate[Factor] ) and TotalSales =IF ( HASONEVALUE ( ReportCurrency[ReportCurrency] ), SUMX ( FactSales, [Sales] * [TrnExchangeRate] )) As explained in the blog post the SUMX in this calculation will iterate over each row in the fact table which probably will have multiple currencies... Read more
Here is a post that is long overdue as the functionality has been available for almost a year now. Today we will enable scheduled refresh to the Strava custom connector I build before. The trick to this is that we need to extend the code of the Strava connector with a “TestConnection” function as is described here. This will allow the Power BI gateway to know how to test the connection. Of course we will... Read more
As of this month Power BI finally supports filtering slicers down to only show rows that have fact data. Before the only thing you could do to achieve this was some workaround like: I described here where you filter down the dimension using a calc table. The other approach was to use Bi Directional cross filtering which would filter down the dimension table appropriately. This leads to performance issues though. Now you can use a... Read more
I have been using SSAS for years, started years before I started at Microsoft, but most of my real world experience is around using SSAS on premises. In the day there was only Profiler, but now we are in a whole new world that is called Azure. Last week I got a question on how to monitor and audit an SSAS server in Azure and I decided to investigate. Turns out it amazing 🙂 so... Read more