I’m in the progress of migrating some legacy stuff at a client, and in their Power BI environment there are still quite some Power BI dataflows Gen1. I had migrated an Azure Synapse Dedicated SQL Pool to an Azure SQL DB (much cheaper for their volume of data), and in the dev/test environment all dataflows […]
Category: Power BI
Book Review – Microsoft Power BI Performance Best Practices
I was asked to do a review of the book Microsoft Power BI Performance Best Practices 2nd edition (Amazon link), which means I got a copy for free. The book is written by Thomas Leblanc and Bhavik Merchant and published by Packt. As the title obviously implicates, the book aims to give you a set […]
Create a Numbers Table in Power Query
This is a quick blog post, mainly so I have the code available if I need it somewhere in the future 🙂 Sometimes you need a numbers table (also called tally table) when you’re working with data. It’s a table with one single integer column that contains incremental numbers (0,1,2,3,4,…). In a database, it’s fairly […]
Microsoft finally adds Tenant Switcher for Fabric / Power BI
Praise whatever deity you believe in, because it’s finally here, a tenant switcher for Microsoft Fabric (which includes Power BI). A what? Let me explain. When you have a organization with multiple tenants in Azure (also called directories in some products like Azure Devops), or you’re a consultant like me who works with multiple clients […]
Connect to Power BI as a Guest User in another Tenant
Sometimes your Microsoft Entra ID account (formerly known as Azure Active Directory) is added as a guest user in another tenant. This happens quite a lot when you’re a consultant and your client can’t create a new user in their own tenant, so they add the account of your own company as a guest instead. […]
How to Calculate Compound Rate in Power BI
Recently I had an interesting use case where I had to a compound calculation in Power BI. You can compound an interest rate for example, where you get a certain rate on your savings. Let’s say 1% (which is at the time of writing ridiculously high, but bear with me). After 1 year, you get […]
Power BI Desktop overwrites Authentication Settings in Similar Connections
Yesterday I was facing an annoying issue. I have two Power BI datasets. Both connect to the same Azure SQL database, but with different SQL users (they have both different permissions on the data in the database). This can be a use case for example where you have data for multiple clients inside one single […]
Power BI Field Parameters and Slowly Changing Dimensions
Power BI field parameters are a new feature in Power BI Desktop, and it’s one of the best of the past months. In short, Power BI field parameters allow you to easily switch between dimensions attributes or measures in a filter. Previously, you had to do all sorts of DAX wizardry to make this happen, […]
Azure Function with PowerShell and the Power BI REST API
In this blog post I’m going to show you how you can create an Azure Function that will interact with the Power BI REST API. I choose PowerShell as the programming language because in my opinion it was a bit easier to authenticate with the Power BI service. For the development environment, I’m using Visual […]
DirectQuery to Power BI Datasets
A new feature has been added to the Power BI Desktop toolset and it’s a very nice one. The official name is “DirectQuery for PBI datasets and AS”. It allows you to create a connection to an existing model (either Analysis Services or a Power BI dataset) and link tables from that model into your […]