All about Power BI, Modelling, DAX and Microsoft BI
I was playing around with calculation groups for a question. I found that adding a calculation group is not that straightforward as it should be, so I decided to blog about it to help you along. What are calculation groups? First let’s talk a little bit about calculation groups itself. Calculation groups is one of the most notable features for Tabular models in a long long time. In short it allows you to change measure... Read more
When you are optimizing your DirectQuery model and you have done all the optimizations on the model already, you might want to run the queries generated by Power BI by your DBA. He then might be able to do some index tuning or even suggest some model changes. But how do you capture them? There are a few simple ways that I will describe here. 1 Use DAX studio and Power BI desktop We will... Read more
Quick one today. This question came up recently: “I only want to show values in a chart when someone selected a slicer”. Now this is actually not that hard, so here is the trick (and a little bonus too). First I created a page I wanted it including the slicer: Now the next thing I want is that the values of the visual only show when I select a country. First thing I do is... Read more
A lot has already been written on aggregations and it is one of the most exciting features of Power BI in a while. The guys at SQLBI did a session on it and my colleague Phil Seamark wrote an amazing host of articles with many details and tips and tricks on it. So why another article? Most people think aggregations is only applicable to petabyte scale data sets. That doesn’t have to be the true... Read more
As the end of the year closes I was reminiscing on what a huge year it has been for Power BI. I work mostly with large organisations so my view will be slightly skewed towards that. For me 2019 has been the year where Power BI got massive adoption as the standard BI platform in an organisation, it went from self serve to also contain corporate BI. These two pictures from one of Arun’s keynote... Read more
I meet a lot of customers in my job, either through the Microsoft field or at conferences and many times we hear the same: “We love Power BI and we as IT have enabled it for everyone now”. Of course this is great news that we love to hear. Unfortunately that approach rarely works. Users in the organisation don’t know the tools exist, how to get access, where to find good data sources, already uses... Read more
I get many questions around Power BI and security related features. Users and customers often don’t realize that most of their requirements can actually be solved by AAD. Power BI uses AAD to handle authentication and authorization. Because of this we can also leverage all the features of AAD to add additional security and rules to Power BI. If you want to understand how AAD and Power BI work together guy in a cube has... Read more
Recently I attended an excellent session by Andy Kirk on the state of data visualization for 2019. One of the tools Andy is most excited about is called Charticulator. For those of you that haven’t heard about it, Charticulator is an open source project from Microsoft Research. Using a web UI you can design almost any charts by interactively specifying constraints (NO code). The best news is that you can use these visuals directly in Power... Read more