Know Thyself: Power BI Source Control

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Last year my wife and I did a tour of Greece, and we had a blast. Greece, of course, is the place to go if you are interested in ancient history and the origin of democracy. One of the places we visited was Delphi. The ancient Greeks believed it to be the center of the universe. Now not much was left of it except lots of ruins and imagination. But back then it was magnificent. People from all over the world would come to consult with the Oracle of Delphi. She delivered her prophecies from the temple of Apollo, which had three inscriptions, with one of them being “Know thyself”. The practical benefit for the oracle was that if you believed her cryptic prophecy wasn’t fulfilled then your interpretation was wrong. Therefore, the problem was in you because you didn’t know yourself.

How does this translate into BI? I see clients overly excited about Microsoft Fabric/Power BI Premium, believing that bundling features will solve all their issues. But knowing your organization, ask yourself if your users would use all these features to justify the premium price. A case in point: Power BI source control via workspace Git integration: a feature that appear to be created from developers for developers. Kristyna Hughes did a great presentation for our Atlanta BI Group on Monday covering how developers can take the most of this feature.

Given the self-service focus of Power BI, however, I doubt that data analysts would subject themselves to learning Azure DevOps, Visual Studio Code, and Git CI/CD. Yet, Power BI source control has been in demand since the beginning with the most common ask – the ability to roll back changes.

Here is my take to simplify Power BI source control for regular users:

Power BI Premium/PPU/Fabric clients

  1. If you are on Power BI Premium, set up a branch for each workspace that you want to put under source control, and configure the workspaces for Git integration.
  2. Let business users publish changes as usual.
  3. Periodically and as a part of the change management process, the workspace admin approves the changes and commits them to source control. I hope one day Power BI would transparently commit changes to Git as Azure Data Factory does it, without requiring explicit synchronization. Meanwhile, the admin must manually commit.
  4. Someone privileged to Azure DevOps would need to roll back changes if needed. Again, I hope one day history review, compare, and roll back will be baked in Power BI.

Power BI Pro clients

  1. Once this feature is generally available, embrace Power BI Desktop projects.
  2. When significant changes are made, back up report and model.bim json files to some location, such as OneDrive which has built-in version control.
  3. Replace the project files when you need to roll back changes. Again, this “poor man” source control emphasizes simplicity and saves premium licenses.

Atlanta Microsoft BI Group Meeting on February 5th (Power BI – Time to Git CI/CD)

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Atlanta BI fans, please join us for the next meeting on Monday, February 5th at 6:30 PM ET. Note that this will be an online meeting via MS Teams and non-Atlanta BI fans are also welcome. Kristyna Hughes (Senior Consultant with 3Cloud) will show us how to implement source control for Power BI reports. Your humble correspondent will help you catch up on Microsoft BI latest. For more details and sign up, visit our group page.

Presentation: Power BI – Time to Git CI/CD

Delivery: Online

Date: February 5

Time: 18:30 – 20:30 ET

Level: Intermediate

Food: NA

 

Agenda:

18:15-18:30 Registration and networking

18:30-19:00 Organizer and sponsor time (events, Microsoft BI latest, sponsor marketing)

19:00-20:15 Main presentation

20:15-20:30 Q&A

Overview: As report developers, requirements for reports are constantly evolving which leads the reports themselves to change. However, inevitably, there will be one party who uses that report and was unaware of changes. They may request a list of changes or want that report rolled back to a previous version. With git, we can provide a list of changes and roll back to any version requested.

Taking a page from application developers, Power BI developers can now develop reports in branches and merge changes using git and Azure DevOps! If half those words are new to you and you’re looking for a better way to manage version history, come to this session! We will go through the basics of git including what branches are, how to use them, and some best practices while working with git. Git has a few tricks that we will go through as well like fetching a branch, in-line comparisons, and pulling to avoid merge conflicts. Don’t worry, we will also touch on how to resolve merge conflicts as well as how to avoid them. After the basics of git, we’ll walk through how to use git with Power BI workspaces and Azure DevOps.

Speaker: Kristyna Hughes is a senior data & analytics consultant at 3Cloud. Her experience includes implementing and managing enterprise-level Power BI instance, training teams on reporting best practices, and building templates for scalable analytics. Passionate about participating and growing the data community, she enjoys co-writing on Data on Wheels (dataonwheels.com) and has co-founded Data on Rails (dataonrailsblog.com). She also is a co-organizer for Lexington Data Technology Group and co-host of Wednesday Lunch & Learns on YouTube with Chris Wagner.

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SSRS Going on 20

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Last year around this time, I went to Antarctica on an expedition ship. Although I got my fair share of icebergs, whales, and penguins, I found it interesting to reproduce some of the experience of the first explorers. On our way back, we got it pretty rough crossing the Drake passage. 80% of the passengers succumbed to sea sickness. There was a huge swell during the night. The next day the captain told us that we faced some 10-meter waves. It felt like a bad roller coaster ride. Yet, the explorers did it. On wooden ships with no stabilizers and communication. Not knowing where they were going and with a high probability that they won’t survive!

What does this have to do BI? The remote connection is that 20 years ago a small group from Microsoft was set up to create a new reporting tool that was code-named “Rosetta” and later became known as SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS). They took a brave new approach and soon SSRS wiped out the established reporting tools, and together with Analysis Services and SQL Server, became one of the pillars of Microsoft BI. SSRS open new possibilities and certainly changed my career. Kudos to the SSRS team and human spirit!

Atlanta Microsoft BI Group Meeting on January 9th (Getting Started with Power BI Paginated Reports)

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Atlanta BI fans, please join us for the next meeting on Monday, January 8th, at 6:30 PM ET. Eric Flamm will review paginated (SSRS) reports in Power BI. Your humble correspondent will help you catch up on Microsoft BI latest. For more details and sign up, visit our group page.

Presentation: Getting Started with Power BI Paginated Reports

Delivery: In-person

Date: January 9

Time: 18:30 – 20:30 ET

Level: Beginner

Food: TBD

 

Agenda:

18:15-18:30 Registration and networking

18:30-19:00 Organizer and sponsor time (events, Power BI latest, sponsor marketing)

19:00-20:15 Main presentation

20:15-20:30 Q&A

 

Venue

Improving Office

11675 Rainwater Dr

Suite #100

Alpharetta, GA 30009

 

Overview: Power BI Paginated Reports are the successor to SQL Server Reporting Services reports (although SSRS is still part of the SQL Server BI Stack). Using the same RDL (report definition language) as SSRS, Power BI Paginated Reports enable report developers to create “pixel-perfect” reports with complete control over item placement, pagination, row and column grouping and subtotals, etc. In this demo-centric session, we’ll use Power BI Report Builder on the desktop to design reports using datasets from local sources as well as Azure databases. We’ll look at parameterization and custom expressions and publish our report to the Power BI service. If time permits, we’ll take a look at building paginated reports in the online service, a capability Microsoft released last year.

 

Speaker: Eric is an independent Business Intelligence consultant, serving a range of clients including service and manufacturing enterprises, startups, and non-profit organizations. His practice includes SQL Server-based projects as well as Excel, Office Automation, and the occasional Microsoft Access project. Eric works with the Atlanta PASS Chapter as the webmaster and has volunteered with SQL Saturday Atlanta since the first event (SQL Saturday #13). Recently, he has presented to SQL Saturday Atlanta, SQL Saturday Chicago, Atlanta Code Camp, the Atlanta Power BI chapter, and the Kennesaw (GA) Amazon Web Services Meetup group.

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