Blog – Page 15 – Prologika

Applied Power BI Book (6th Edition)

January 2, 2021 / No Comments »

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 a great experience to witness the momentum surrounding Power BI and how the tool has matured over time. As a result, the book also got thicker and it almost doubled in size. However, I believe what's more important is that this book provides systematic, yet dependent, view by showing what Power BI can do for four types of users (business users, analysts, pros, and developers). To my understanding, this is the only Power BI book that gets annual revisions to keep it up to date...
Atlanta MS BI and Power BI Group Meeting on January 4th

December 31, 2020 / No Comments »

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 Overview Date: January 4th, 2020 Time 6:30 – 8:30 PM ET Place: Click here to join the meeting Learn More | Meeting options Overview: The data lake has become extremely popular, but there is still confusion on how it should be used. In this presentation I will cover common big data architectures that use the data lake, the characteristics and benefits of a data lake, and how it works in conjunction with a relational data warehouse. Then I’ll go into details on using Azure Data...
Microsoft Dataverse: A Verse Without Rhymes

December 30, 2020 / No Comments »

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 or CDS-A). I wrote two years ago about the pros and cons of CDS-A. The ugly award back then went to getting the data out of Dynamics. I wrote "For years people were complaining that after migrating from the on-premises Dynamics to the cloud, they lost the ability to connect to its database directly and they had to rely on the REST APIs (slow) or Data Export Service to export the data to an SQL Server Database (fast but requires additional effort and budget)." Have...
The Science of Counting

December 4, 2020 / No Comments »

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, and litigations, these numbers will probably double by the time the dust settles down. What did we get back? Based on what I've heard, 50% of Americans believe this election is rigged, just like 50% believed so in 2016. The 2020 election added of course more options for abuse because of the large number of mail-in ballots. It's astonishing how manual and complicated the whole process is, not to mention that each state does things differently. But the more human involvement and moving parts, the...
Atlanta MS BI and Power BI Group Meeting on December 7th

December 3, 2020 / No Comments »

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 model Date: December 7th, 2020 Time 6:30 – 8:30 PM ET Place: Click here to join the meeting Learn More | Meeting options Overview: When working with your Power BI Data Model/Dataset there are certain that can be done to optimize the size of the model. With that, there are certain thing that can be done that wreaks havoc on your Data Model. In this session we will walk you through several things that can be done to ensure that your data model is optimize...
Understanding Power BI Endpoints

November 29, 2020 / No Comments »

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 probably found when connecting to published datasets. Later, Power BI Premium added the XMLA endpoint to support external clients connected to datasets in a premium capacity. If you're on Premium, you should use the XMLA endpoint to connect external clients by using the Azure Analysis Services connector. Unfortunately, if you do so in PBI Desktop, "Get Data" won't give you the nice UX that shows you which datasets are certified. It will be nice if Microsoft adds a mechanism in the future where the client...
Updated Export Settings

November 26, 2020 / No Comments »

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 connections to published datasets and features that depend on it, such as connecting to published datasets in Power BI Desktop, accessing the Power BI Premium XMLA endpoint, and Analyze in Excel. Instead, there is a clear distinction and now there two separate settings that affect external connectivity (for XMLA connectivity, the XMLA Endpoint capacity setting must be enabled in Read-Only or Read-Write modes): Allow live connections – This is a catch-all setting for allowing the live connectivity features. Allow XMLA endpoints and Analyze in Excel...
Power BI Dynamic M Query Parameters – Another Opportunity Missed for DirectQuery Users

October 21, 2020 / No Comments »

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 (real-time BI). Naturally, the customer envisioned a single set of reports with the ability to switch the dataset connection to the respective database depending on the user identity and company association. In addition, they wanted to piggyback on the existing database security policies by having each visual call a stored procedure and pass the user identity as a dynamic parameter. Can Power BI do this? Unfortunately, no. The main architectural issue is that although the model (VertiPaq) and query (Power Query) are bundled in Power...
Stop Using the Power BI Folder Connector

October 10, 2020 / No Comments »

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 don't work so well anymore. The only option is to install a personal gateway on your laptop with all the issues surrounding it. Instead, I recommend you upload files to Azure Data Lake Storage and use the Power BI Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 connector. Setting this up will require some assistance from your friendly IT department to set up ADLS and grant you access, but they shouldn't complain if they are serious about data governance. Like the Folder connector, you can combine multiple files...
Power Query Merging on GUID Columns

October 10, 2020 / No Comments »

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 the preview pane. However, when you apply the changes, the related columns are not populated (empty) in the Power BI data model. In other words, the join fails to find matches. Solution: I think there is some sort of a bug in Power Query. True, Power Query is case-sensitive so joining on the same text that differs in casing in the two columns would fail the match. However, in this case the guids were all lower case (or at least that's how they appear in...