PROLOGIKA BLOG · IDEAS FROM THE FIELD
Practical perspectives on Microsoft Fabric, Power BI, semantic models, and the work of turning data into insight.
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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…
Read article 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:…
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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…
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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…
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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…
Read article 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…
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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…
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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,…
Read article 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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