Blog – Prologika

Direct Lake Composite Models

March 4, 2026 / No Comments »

I’ve mentioned previously in the “A Couple of Direct Lake Gotchas” post that unlike Power BI reports, Excel surprised me by not showing user-defined hierarchies in a Direct Lake model. Direct Lake comes with other gotchas, such as not supporting DAX calculated columns and SQL views. I normally don’t use calculated columns, but they can come in handy, such as for flatting a parent-child hierarchies outside ETL. And I like SQL views as an insurance policy for making quick transforms or filters on top of loaded tables to avoid ETL changes. Recently, Microsoft introduced composite Direct Lake models which I demonstrated as a part of a pilot project, mainly to preserve the Excel report experience for financial users. Direct Lake Only vs Composite Direct Lake I view the composite Direct Lake models as the best of both worlds and this table summarizes their characteristics. Direct Lake Only Composite (Direct Lake...
Atlanta Microsoft BI Group Meeting on March 2nd (Your First Steps in Microsoft Fabric Using Just SQL)

February 25, 2026 / No Comments »

Atlanta BI fans, please join us in person for our next meeting on Monday, March 2nd at 18:30 ET. Shabnam Watson will show you how you can apply your SQL skills in Microsoft Fabric. And your humble correspondent will walk you through some of the latest Power BI and Fabric enhancements. I will sponsor the meeting. For more details and sign up, visit our group page. Delivery: In-person Level: Beginner/Intermediate Food: Pizza and drinks will be provided Agenda: 18:15-18:30 Registration and networking 18:30-19:00 Organizer and sponsor time (news, Power BI latest, sponsor marketing) 19:00-20:15 Main presentation 20:15-20:30 Q&A Overview: New to Microsoft Fabric? Don’t worry—you already know more than you think. In this beginner-friendly session, we’ll explore how your existing SQL skills translate directly into Fabric without needing to learn Spark, Python, or unfamiliar engineering tools. You’ll see how SQL can be applied across Fabric items to explore, shape, and analyze data...
A Couple of Direct Lake Gotchas

February 24, 2026 / No Comments »

I’m helping an enterprise client modernize their data analytics estate. As a part of this exercise, a SSAS Multidimensional financial cube must be converted to a Power BI semantic model. The challenge is that business users ask for almost real-time BI during the forecasting period, where a change in the source forecasting system must be quickly propagated to the reporting the layer, so the users don’t sit around waiting to analyze the impact. An important part of this architecture is the Fabric Direct Lake storage to eliminate the refresh latency, but it came up with a couple of gotchas. Performance issues with calculated accounts Financial MD cubes are notoriously difficult to convert to Tabular/Power BI because of advanced features that aren’t supported in the new world, such as Account Intelligence, scope assignments, parent-child hierarchies, and calculated dimension members. The latter presented a performance challenge. Consider the following MDX construct: CREATE...
Atlanta Microsoft BI Group Meeting on February 2nd (Power BI Translytical Taskflows)

January 28, 2026 / No Comments »

Atlanta BI fans, please join us in person for our next meeting on Monday, February 2nd at 18:30 ET. Sukhwant Kaur (Product Manager at Microsoft) will show you how supercharge your Power BI reports with translytical taskflows. And your humble correspondent will walk you through some of the latest Power BI and Fabric enhancements. CloudStaff.au will sponsor the meeting. For more details and sign up, visit our group page. Delivery: In-person Level: Beginner/Intermediate Food: Pizza and drinks will be provided Agenda: 18:15-18:30 Registration and networking 18:30-19:00 Organizer and sponsor time (news, Power BI latest, sponsor marketing) 19:00-20:15 Main presentation 20:15-20:30 Q&A Overview: Join us for an engaging session exploring how to build powerful translytical applications using Power BI, Functions, and SQL Database within Microsoft Fabric. We'll discuss best practices for integrating analytics and transactional workloads, demonstrate real-world use cases, and provide actionable tips for leveraging Fabric’s unified platform. This talk is ideal...
Power BI Dynamic Measure Tooltip

December 31, 2025 / No Comments »

Happy New Year with oldies but goodies…especially given that this technique might be hard to find elsewhere! How do you implement a tooltip page that shows only the measure the end user hovers over? Consider this matrix with three measures on columns grouped by product categories on rows. The user wants to see a trend chart for the measure they hover over. Understanding the challenge Power BI has long supported custom tooltip pages. Passing member context, such as the selected product category, is not an issue. However, passing the selected measure won’t work without some blackbelt magic because measures are not field members. And so, we will have to turn the measures used in the matrix in a dimension. Then, instead of adding measures to the matrix as you would typically do, you would use the dimension. You can probably follow a similar implementation approach using Power BI field parameters,...
Atlanta Microsoft BI Group Meeting on January 5th (Visual Calculations in Power BI)

December 30, 2025 / No Comments »

Atlanta BI fans, please join us in person for our next meeting on Monday, January 5th at 18:30 ET. Dean Jurecic will show you how Power BI visual calculations can simplify the process of writing DAX. And your humble correspondent will walk you through some of the latest Power BI and Fabric enhancements. Key2 Consulting will sponsor the meeting. For more details and sign up, visit our group page. Delivery: In-person Level: Beginner/Intermediate Food: Pizza and drinks will be provided Agenda: 18:15-18:30 Registration and networking 18:30-19:00 Organizer and sponsor time (news, Power BI latest, sponsor marketing) 19:00-20:15 Main presentation 20:15-20:30 Q&A Overview: Do you sometimes get lost in a sea of complicated DAX and wonder if there is an easier way? Is it difficult to drive self-service reporting in your organization because business users aren’t familiar with the nuances of DAX and Semantic Models? Visual Calculations might be able to help! Introduced...
First Look at Fabric IQ: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

December 27, 2025 / No Comments »

Telegraph sang a song about the world outside Telegraph road got so deep and so wide Like a rolling river… The Telegraph Road, Dire Straits At Ignite in November, 2025, Microsoft introduced Fabric IQ. I noted to go beyond the marketing hype and check if Fabric IQ makes any sense. The next thing I know, around the holidays I’m talking to an enterprise strategy manager from an airline company and McKinsey consultant about ontologies. Ontology – A branch of philosophy, ontology is the study of being that investigates the nature of existence, the features all entities have in common, and how they are divided into basic categories of being. In computer science and AI, ontology refers to a set of concepts and categories in a subject area or domain that shows their properties and the relations between them. So, what better way to spend the holidays than to play with new shaky...
Performance and Cost Considerations from Power BI Pro/PPU to Fabric

December 24, 2025 / No Comments »

What performance and cost considerations should you keep in mind if you are currently on Power BI Pro/PPU, but Fabric looks increasingly enticing and you want to upgrade an existing workspace to Fabric? For example, let's say you've started with a pay-per-user workspace, but now you want that workspace to have Fabric features, such as Copilot, Lakehouse, etc. Or, as a typical use case for small to mid-size companies, you could have a Corporate BI workspace with org semantic model(s) that you want to transition to Fabric, such as to take advantage of DirectLake. Performance Performance is difficult to translate because Power BI Pro/PPU run in a shared capacity, meaning compute resources (v‑cores) are pooled across many tenants and dynamically allocated, whereas Fabric capacities are dedicated, meaning that Microsoft grants specific resources expressed as number of cores and memory. Therefore, Fabric performance is predicable while Pro/PPU might not be, although...
Power BI Workspace Identity Authentication

December 9, 2025 / No Comments »

What credentials do you use to refresh your Power BI semantic models from Azure SQL SKUs, such as Azure SQL Database. Probably your credentials or a designated Entra account? Both are not ideal for a variety of reasons, including requiring a password. More advanced users might be using service principals, which are more secure but require secret renewal after a maximum of 24 months, which is a hustle. Somewhere along the way without me noticing, Microsoft added a better authentication option for refreshing Power BI semantic models: workspace identity. This option lets the Power BI workspace using its own managed identity to authenticate to the data source. And it’s available in all Power BI and Fabric SKUs! What’s not clear from the documentation is how to grant permissions to the workspace identity to read data from Azure SQL SKUs but it’s no different that granting access to the Azure Data...
Atlanta Microsoft BI Group Meeting on December 1st (Migrating Semantic Models to Fabric Direct Lake)

November 26, 2025 / No Comments »

Atlanta BI fans, please join us in person for our next meeting on Monday, December 1st at 18:30 ET. I'll show you how to Fabric DirectLake semantic models can help you tackle long refresh cycles and scalability headaches. And your humble correspondent will walk you through some of the latest Power BI and Fabric enhancements. Improving will sponsor the meeting. For more details and sign up, visit our group page. Delivery: In-person Level: Intermediate Food: Pizza and drinks will be provided Agenda: 18:15-18:30 Registration and networking 18:30-19:00 Organizer and sponsor time (news, Power BI latest, sponsor marketing) 19:00-20:15 Main presentation 20:15-20:30 Q&A Overview: Are your Power BI semantic models hitting memory limits? Tired of bending backwards to mitigate long refresh cycles and scalability headaches? Join me for a deep dive into Fabric Direct Lake — a game-changing feature that can help enterprise customers eliminate refreshes, lower licensing cost, and work with production-scale...