Category: Business Intelligence – BI

Business Intelligence - BI, Dataflows, Excel, Power BI, Power BI Desktop, Power BI Desktop RS, Power BI Service, Power Query, Self-Service BI

Quick Tips: Renaming All Tables’ Columns in One Go in Power Query

Renaming All Tables' Columns in One Go in Power Query

I previously wrote a blog post explaining how to rename all columns in a table in one go with Power Query. One of my visitors raised a question in the comments about the possibility to rename all columns from all tables in one go. Interestingly enough, one of my customers had a similar requirement. So I thought it is good to write a Quick Tip explaining how to meet the requirement.

The Problem

You are connecting to the data sources from Power BI Desktop (or Excel or Data Flows). The columns of the source tables are not user friendly, so you require to rename all columns. You already know how to rename all columns of a table in one go but you’d like to apply the renaming columns patterns to all tables.

The Solution

The solution is quite simple. We require to connect to the source, but we do not navigate to any tables straight away. In my case, my source table is an on-premises SQL Server. So I connect to the SQL Server instance using the Sql.Database(Server, DB) function in Power Query where the Server and the DB are query parameters. Read more about query parameters here. The results would like the following image:

The Results of Sql.Database() Function in Power Query
The results of running the Sql.Database(Server, DB) function

As you see in the above image, the results include Tables, Views and Functions. We are not interested in Functions therefore we just filter them out. The following image shows the results after applying the filter:

Filtering out SQL Server Functions After Connecting from Power Query
Filtering out SQL Server Functions

If we look closer to the Data column, we see that the column is indeed a Structured Column. The structured values of the Data column are Table values. If we click on a cell (not on the Table value of the cell), we can see the actual underlying data, as shown in the following image:

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Business Intelligence - BI, Power BI, Power BI Desktop, Quick Tips, Self-Service BI, SQL Server Management Studio - SSMS

Quick Tips: Registering SQL Server Profiler as an External Tool in Power BI Desktop

Registering SQL Server Profiler as an External Tool

It has been a long time that I use SQL Server Profiler to diagnose my data models in the Power BI Desktop. I wrote a blog post in June 2016 about connecting to the underlying Power BI Desktop model from different tools, including SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS), Excel and SQL Server Profiler. In this quick post, I share a pbitool.json file that you can use to register the SQL Server Profiler as an external tool. Read more about how to register an external tool here. This is quite handy as this way to use SQL Server Profiler to diagnose Power BI Desktop without needing to find the diagnostic port. As an external tool, the SQL Server Profiler automatically connects to the data model via the diagnostic port. You can download the sqlserverprofiler.pbitool.json file from here. After you download the file you can open it in a text editor to see or modify the JSON code. If you are using SSMS 18, then you do not even need to modify the file. If you use a different version, the only thing you have to change is the “path”.

The contents of the sqlserverprofiler.pbitool.json file
The contents of the sqlserverprofiler.pbitool.json file
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Azure, Business Intelligence - BI, Data Catalog, Power BI, Power BI Governance, Purview, Self-Service BI

Power BI Governance, Good Practices: Setting up Azure Purview for Power BI

Power BI Governance, Good Practices: Setting up Azure Purview for Power BI

Microsoft newly announced a piece of very exciting news that Azure Purview now supports Power BI. This is massive news from a data governance point of view. Azure Purview is the next generation of Azure Data Catalog with more metadata discovery power and the ability to use sensitivity labels. After reading the news, I immediately decided to set up my test environment and give it a go. I followed the steps mentioned in this article on the Microsoft documentation website but I faced some difficulties to get it to work. And here we are, another blog post to help you to set up the Azure Purview for Power BI.

Note: In this blog post I am not intending to explain what Azure Purview is. You can find heaps of useful information here.

Creating an Azure Purview Resource

We first need to have an Azure subscription, if you don’t have, don’t worry, you can start your Azure free trial subscription here. The following steps explain how to set up Azure Purview for Power BI:Login to the Azure Portal

  1. Click Create a resource button
Creating Azure Purview resource in Azure Portal
Creating Azure Purview resource in Azure Portal

2. Type in Purview in the search box

3. Click Azure Purview

Searching for Purview resource in Azure Portal
Searching for Purview resource in Azure Portal

4. Click the Create button

5. Select your Subscription

6. Select a Resource group or Create new if you don’t have any

7. Type in a name in the Purview account name text box

8. Select the Location

9. Click Review + Create (if you require to do more configurations click Next:Configuration > button)

Creating Azure Purview Account
Creating Azure Purview Account

At this point, Azure validates the configurations and requirements. You may get an error message like below:

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Business Intelligence - BI, Excel, Power BI, Power BI Desktop, Power BI Service, Power Query, Self-Service BI

A Power Query Custom Function to Rename all Columns at Once in a Table

A Power Query Custom Function to Rename all Columns at Once in a Table

I am involved with a Power BI development in the past few days. I got some data exported from various systems in different formats, including Excel, CSV and OData. The CSV files are data export dumps from an ERP system. Working with ERP systems can be very time consuming, especially when you don’t have access to the data model, and you get the data in raw format in CSV files. It is challenging, as in the ERP systems, the table names and column names are not user friendly at all, which makes sense. The ERP systems are being used in various environments for many different customers with different requirements. So if we can get our hands to the underlying data model, we see configuration tables keeping column names. Some of the columns are custom built to cover specific needs. The tables may have many columns that are not necessarily useful for analytical purposes. So it is quite critical to have a good understanding of the underlying entity model. Anyhow, I don’t want to go off-topic.

The Problem

So, here is my scenario. I received about 10 files, including 15 tables. Some tables are quite small, so I didn’t bother. But some of them are really wide like having between 150 to 208 columns. Nice!

Looking at the column names, they cannot be more difficult to read than they are, and I have multiple tables like that. So I have to rename those columns to something more readable, more on this side of the story later.

Background

I emailed back to my customer, asking for their help. Luckily they have a very nice data expert who also understands their ERP system as well as the underlying entity model. I emailed him all the current column names and asked if he can provide more user-friendly names. He replied me back with a mapping table in Excel. Here is an example to show the Column Names Mapping table:

Column Names Mapping

I was quite happy with the mapping table. Now, the next step is to rename all columns is based on the mapping table. Ouch! I have almost 800 columns to rename. That is literally a pain in the neck, and it doesn’t sound quite right to burn the project time to rename 800 columns.

But wait, what about writing automating the rename process? Like writing a custom function to rename all columns at once? I recall I read an excellent blog post about renaming multiple columns in Power Query that Gilbert Quevauvilliers wrote in 2018. I definitely recommend looking at his blog post. So I must do something similar to what Gilbert did; creating a custom function that gets the original columns names and brings back the new names. Then I use the custom function in each table to rename the columns. Easy!

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