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…
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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,…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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UPDATE 17-Feb-2022: Dynamic query parameters now support popular relational data sources, and I posted an updated blog. I had recently a Power BI advisory engagement for a large ISV. They had many customers. and each customer data was hosted in its own database for security reasons, with all databases having an identical schema. Power BI reports had to connect using DirectQuery to avoid refreshing data…
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I know that it's tempting to use the Folder connector to combine multiple files with the same schema and load them in Power BI Desktop with a few clicks – an idea promoted by Microsoft's own Power BI Dashboard in a Day (DIAD) training. But what happens if you want to automate the dataset refresh after uploading your model to Power BI Service? Suddenly, things…
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Scenario: You are merging two tables in Power Query on GUID columns with Text data type. In my case, the first table (UserDim) came from Azure SQL DB and the second (systemusers) from Dynamics CRM, but I believe the source is irrelevant. Then, you expand the second table in the next step after the merge, select the columns you need, and see expected results in…
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You've set up the Azure Data Factory self-hosted integration runtime to access on-prem data sources. You create a linked server, click Test Connection, and then get greeted with an error saying the security context can't be passed. On the on-prem VM, you use the Integration Runtime Configuration Manager and get a similar error or something to the extent that JSON can't be parsed. You spent…
Read article Please join us online for the next Atlanta MS BI and Power BI Group meeting on Monday, October 5th, at 6:30 PM. Paco Gonzalez (CEO of SolidQ) will present and demonstrate the Power BI AI and ML capabilities. 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: AI, ML and Power BI Date:…
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