Microsoft Fabric, Power BI, Analysis Services, DAX, M, MDX, Power Query, Power Pivot and Excel
If you have a DirectQuery fact table in Power BI you can use user-defined aggregations to improve query performance; querying a smaller, summarised copy of your data in an Import mode aggregation table is always going to be faster than querying a large fact table containing all your detail data that is in DirectQuery mode. Continue reading Using Detail Rows Expressions To Drill To A Different Fact…
This week there was another big Copilot-related announcement for Power BI but on the Excel blog. You can now analyse data from Power BI semantic models using Copilot in Excel. Full details on how to enable this are in the docs here, but what does it look like? Using the same semantic model from Continue reading Analysing Power BI Data Using Copilot In Excel
This was a big week for Power BI Copilot with the announcement of a new direction for the feature. If you haven t done so already, read the two announcement blog posts here and here and check out this demo video. There are some pros and cons to this change (yes, you re going to need an Continue reading Power BI, M365 Copilot And The Importance Of DAX UDFs
This week, in the announcement about support for Fabric Pipelines in Workspace Monitoring, I noticed that it came with an Operations Agent that actively monitors and analyses Pipeline activity. And that got me thinking, since Workspace Monitoring also contains Power BI activity data, why not create an Operations Agent to actively monitor Power BI too? Continue reading Using Fabric Operations…
This is a blog post I ve been meaning to write for a long time. Since Fabric launched there has been a lot of focus on Direct Lake mode in Power BI and a lot of people used it because it was the cool new thing. Arguably, we at Microsoft have been guilty of telling people Continue reading The Benefits Of Using Direct Lake Mode In Power BI
A few months ago I wrote about a rare error the Maximum allowable memory allocation error that may occur when the physical machine, or node, that a semantic model is running on in the Power BI Service comes under memory pressure. Recently, someone I was working with who was doing some load testing Continue reading Understanding The Database Was Evicted To Balance The CPU Load Error In Power BI
For as long as I ve been using Power BI which has been from the beginning the advice about which storage mode to choose has been the same: use Import mode unless you have a really, really good reason to use DirectQuery mode and even then you re probably wrong and should use Import mode. Continue reading Power BI DirectQuery Mode: A Better Choice Than You Might Think
Extreme DAX by Michiel Rozema, Madzy Stikkelorum and Henk Vlootman Continuing my series of not-reviews of the latest Power BI-related books (and there are fewer and fewer of them being published) that I receive free copies of, here s the second edition of a book that for some reason I missed first time around: Extreme DAX . Continue reading New Book: Extreme DAX 2nd Edition
Quite a few new Dataflows Gen2 features were released recently without much fanfare, but that doesn t mean they aren t important. I will take a look at them all in my next few posts; in this first post I ll look at the ability to disable V-Order on staged data. As the (very detailed) documentation for this Continue reading Improve Performance Of Staging In Fabric Dataflows Gen2 By Disabling…
To finish off my series of posts on concurrent evaluation in Fabric Dataflows Gen2 (see part 1 and part 2) I decided to do some more realistic tests to see how much parallelism I could get. To do this I uploaded 244 identical Excel files containing almost 542000 rows of data each to a SharePoint Continue reading Fabric Dataflows Gen2 And Concurrent Evaluation, Part 3: Is More Parallelism Always…