All about Power BI, Modelling, DAX and Microsoft BI
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
For those who have been with me for a while know that I have been working from home since the summer of 2016 after I moved back from Seattle to the Netherlands. I am very fortunate to be able to still work on the awesome Power BI team in a remote position. Many of you have asked me how does this work? Isn’t it boring and lonely ? How can you get your work done?... Read more
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