I've noticed severe performance degradation after refreshing a Power BI Desktop model with some five million rows. The Power BI Desktop process showed a sustained 50-60 % utilization for minutes in the Windows Task Manager. I did a profiler trace and I saw expensive DAX queries like these: EVALUATE SELECTCOLUMNS(FILTER(VALUES('Sales'[PONumber]),LEN('Sales'[PONumber])<=100),"valueColumn",'Sales'[PONumber]) EVALUATE SELECTCOLUMNS(FILTER(VALUES('Sales'[SalesOrderNumber]),LEN('Sales'[SalesOrderNumber])<=100),"valueColumn",'Sales'[SalesOrderNumber]) EVALUATE SELECTCOLUMNS(FILTER(VALUES('Sales'[InvoiceNumber]),LEN('Sales'[InvoiceNumber])<=100),"valueColumn",'Sales'[InvoiceNumber]) As it turned out, Power BI Desktop autogenerates these queries when…
Happy New Year! I'm excited to announce the availability of the sixth edition of my Applied Microsoft Power BI book! When the first edition was published in January 2016, it was the first Power BI book at that time and it had less than 300 pages. Since then, I helped many companies adopt or transition to Power BI and taught hundreds of students. It's been…
Bring your data to life today and learn how Power BI changes the way everyone gains insights from data. Publication date: 1/1/2021 Size: 556 pages, 7.5" x 9.25" Price: $49.99 ISBN 10: 1-7330461-2-7 ISBN 13: 978-1-7330461-2-1 Introduces information workers, data analysts, IT pros, and developers to Microsoft Power BI — a cloud-hosted, business intelligence and analytics platform that democratizes and opens BI to everyone, making it free…
Please join us online for the next Atlanta MS BI and Power BI Group meeting on Monday, January 4th, at 6:30 PM. James Serra (Big Data/Data Warehouse Evangelist at Microsoft) will share best practices around staging data in an organizational data lake. For more details, visit our group page and don't forget to RSVP (fill in the RSVP survey if you're planning to attend). Presentation: Data Lake…
The cloud is supposed to make things easier, right? Well, not necessarily, as a client and I have recently discovered. They use Dynamics Online 365 and they are facing long refresh times for Power BI datasets that import data from Dynamics. Dynamics saves its data in an Azure SQL Database, which now goes by the name Dataverse (previously known as Common Data Service for Apps…
I hope you're enjoying the holidays. In this newsletter, I'll discuss a very important enhancement to Power BI that lets business users extend semantic models. But before I get to it, a quick announcement. I'm putting the finishing touches of the sixth edition of my "Applied Microsoft Power BI"! It should be available on Amazon in the first days of 2021. I've been updating this…
I'm watching the witness testimonies for election irregularities in Georgia (the state where I live). I'm shocked about how this election became such a mess and international embarrassment. United States spent 10 billion on the 2020 election. Georgia alone spent more than 100 million on some machines the security experts said can be hacked in minutes. If we add the countless number of manhours, investigations,…
Please join us online for the next Atlanta MS BI and Power BI Group meeting on Monday, December 7th, at 6:30 PM. Patrick LeBlanc (A Guy in the Cube) will share techniques to optimize your Power BI data models. For more details, visit our group page and don't forget to RSVP (fill in the RSVP survey if you're planning to attend). Presentation: Optimizing the size of your…
In its early days, Power BI introduced an endpoint to support Analyze in Excel (AIXL). Later, the "Power BI datasets" connector relied on this endpoint to support connecting to published datasets. The AIXL endpoint was never intended to support other clients. It has a few limitations, such as it doesn't support long running requests and write operations. Also, it doesn't support importing data as you've…
A Happy Thanksgiving to all of you! I'm thankful for your interest in and support of my work. I'm glad that Microsoft has recently updated the Power BI tenant export settings and thus mitigated the the complaints I had in my "A False Sense of Data Security" blog. Disabling the "Export to …" settings, which now applies also to paginated reports, no longer disables live…
