Blog – Page 14 – Prologika

Use Edge Dev Profiles

April 26, 2021 / No Comments »

If you need a convincing reason to use Edge Dev, user profiles might be it. I need access to various Power BI tenants that I need to log in. Or, your organization might have multiple Power BI tenants, such as a byproduct of acquisitions. Previously, I had to either use multiple browsers, open an incognito session (the caveat is that you can't have two incognito sessions with different credentials), or install browser extensions to support simultaneous open sessions to Power BI. Now, all I have to do is to create a profile for each client. To do so: Open Edge Dev. Click the Profile icon in the top right and then click Add Profile. Follow the steps to log in using the needed credentials. Once the profile is created, click the profile icon and then click the desired profile. This will open a new normal (not incognito) session side by...
Top 5 Power BI UX Gaps

April 11, 2021 / No Comments »

Power BI has made tremendous strides in features solidifying its position as a BI leader and increasing the feature distance over the competition (see latest Gartner report here). And rightfully so, considering that it's much more than a visualization tool. However, you might find its advanced presentation capabilities still lagging. During a current BI assessment for a large mortgage company, the executive sponsor who have used before Tableau and Qlik told me that "some features that could be done in Qlik or Tableau in 10 minutes could take days with Power BI". So much about "five seconds to sign up, five minutes to wow!" It's hard to vow an audience that has seen better … Here are the top 5 Power BI UX gaps to watch for especially if you're migrating to Power BI from these two tools: No dynamic binding – A long time ago, Microsoft promised that most...
Awarded FastTrack Recognized Solution Architect

April 8, 2021 / No Comments »

Microsoft awarded me FastTrack Recognized Solution Architect - Power BI! This prestigious recognition is conferred by the Power Platform product engineering team for consistently exhibiting deep architecture expertise and creating high quality solutions for customers during project engagements. I'm one of the 33 individuals worldwide who must meet the following criteria: Must have a minimum of 2 years of experience with Power BI and a minimum of 5 years of experience with Enterprise BI solutions Must have a minimum of 2 years of experience as an Enterprise BI architect Must be working for a partner with Gold certification in Data Analytics MPN competency Must have been lead architect for at least 2 Power BI in-production implementations with at least 200 active users (Preferably for CAT managed customers) I might be also featured in a short video during the James Phillip's keynote on May 4th at the Microsoft Business Application Summit.
When Something Goes Wrong (Unable to Load the Model)

March 18, 2021 / No Comments »

Scenario: You deploy a model to a Power BI workspace. You assign users to Members and Viewers roles. Everyone is happy. You later added a row-level security role and republish the model. Admins, Contributors and Members continue to view reports connected to the dataset as usual. However, Viewers report an error like the one shown below (didn't Microsoft do an outstanding job explaining what went wrong with all of these guids?): Analysis: Users with Administrator, Member, and Contributor permissions bypass any row-level security policies even if they assigned as role members. However, viewers are refused access unless they are added to a role that grants them the appropriate permissions. So, the likely culprit here is that there are some viewers that are not assigned to a role. If viewers should have unrestricted access to an RLS-enabled dataset, create an Open Access role and add them to the role. As a...
Solving RLS Gotchas

March 8, 2021 / No Comments »

Scenario: You've created a beautiful, wide-open Tabular model. You use USERELATIONSHIP() to switch relationships on and off. Everything works and everyone is pleased. Then RLS sneaks in, such as when external users need access, and you must secure on some dimension table. You create a role, specify a row filter, test the role, and get greeted with: The UseRelationship() and CrossFilter() functions may not be used when querying '<dimension table>' because it is constrained by row-level security defined on '<dimension table>' or related tables. Analysis: There is a long-standing Tabular limitation that prevents USERELATIONSHIP for an added level of security which may be triggered even if USERELATIONSHIP doesn't enable a relationship on the security propagation path. This is done to prevent information disclosure in case there is some other active relationship (since UseRelationship would disable security propagation across the other relationship). Unfortunately, the current design is "no inactive relationship, no...
State Health Department Gains Reliable and Rapid COVID Insights

February 26, 2021 / No Comments »

Amidst the pandemic, the Houston Health Department (HHD) had another predicament to tackle. With lab results accumulating rapidly at one million cases per month, the vendor system they used for capturing and analyzing COVID data couldn't keep up. The SQL Server database had large tables with normalized name-value pairs for each question and answer received from the patient, and for each investigation result. Read our case study to learn how Prologika implemented a BI solution powered by SQL Server and Power BI to help HHD gain reliable and timely insights from COVID lab results.
Atlanta MS BI and Power BI Group Meeting on March 1st

February 21, 2021 / No Comments »

Please join us online for the next Atlanta MS BI and Power BI Group meeting on Monday, March 1st, at 6:30 PM. Your humble correspondent will discuss the business value of semantic models and implementation options for self-service BI and organizational BI. For more details, visit our group page. Download the slide deck from here. Presentation: Implementing Semantic Models Date: March 1st, 2021 Time 6:30 – 8:30 PM ET Place: Microsoft Teams Overview: A semantic model is a layer between the data source and end user. Data analysts create self-service semantic models with Power BI Desktop or Excel. BI developers implement organizational semantic models with SSDT, Tabular Editor, and PBI Desktop. Join this session to: · Learn what is a semantic model and how to choose between the self-service and organizational paths. · Understand the implementation options for self-service BI models and best modeling practices. · Find how organizational semantic...
Atlanta MS BI and Power BI Group Meeting on February 1st

January 31, 2021 / No Comments »

Please join us online for the next Atlanta MS BI and Power BI Group meeting on Monday, February 1st, at 6:30 PM. Paul Turley (MVP) will show you how to use Power Query to shape and transform data. For more details, visit our group page. Presentation: Preparing, shaping & transforming Power BI source data Date: February 1st, 2021 Time 6:30 – 8:30 PM ET Place: Click here to join the meeting Learn More | Meeting options Overview: In a business intelligence solution, data must be shaped and transformed. Your source data is rarely, if ever, going to be in the right format for analytic reporting. It may need to be consolidated into related fact and dimension tables, summarized, grouped or just cleaned-up before tables can be imported into a data model for reporting. · Where should I shape and transform data… At the source? In Power Query, or In the...
Calculation Group Gotchas

January 24, 2021 / No Comments »

The moment you add a calculation group to your model, Power BI sets DiscourageImplicitMeasures = True on the model. Although this property can trick you to be believe that they are still supported, you can't create implicit measures, such as by dragging a numeric field on the report to summarize that field. That's because implicit measures are created as inline calculations which calculation groups don't support. Also, there is a current issue where when you add a column from a calculation group to a filter, "Require single selection" is set to on and it can't be changed. Therefore, you won't be able to filter multiple calculation items, such as to present t only MTD, QTD, and YTD from a list of many items in your calculation group. As a workaround, you add a calculated column that flags the desired values and filter on it. You can vote to expedite the...
Rogue Q&A Queries

January 24, 2021 / No Comments »

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 building a Q&A index. The 100-size limit is because Power BI wants to keep the index small. In addition, values that are longer than 100 characters are unlikely to be asked by the user. Why not check thd the maximum column value and skip the column? Power BI wants to skip instances that are too long but still index the remaining instances of the column. To avoid this performance degradation when modeling on the desktop you could disable the Q&A feature. This will also disable...