Power BI Service Archives - Page 4 of 13

Microsoft Fabric, Power BI, Power BI Service, Self-Service BI

Copilot for Power BI, What Does it Mean for Power BI Development?

AI and ML have come a long way in the past decade, transforming how we develop software and applications. One of the most impressive examples is OpenAI’s Codex, a system that can generate code from natural language descriptions. Codex powers Copilot, a tool that helps developers write better code faster and easier. In this blogpost I am going to express my opinion about this sophisticated technology and its integration with my favourite data platform, Power BI, well, I mean Microsoft Fabric.

What is Copilot, and how does it work?

Copilot is an AI-powered tool that provides suggestions for code completion and documentation as you type. It works as an extension for Visual Studio Code and GitHub Codespaces. Copilot can understand the context and intent of your code and generate relevant suggestions that match your coding style and best practices. You can accept, reject, or modify the suggestions as you wish.

Copilot is not just a code autocomplete tool. It can also help you write tests, implement new features, fix bugs, and learn new frameworks or languages. Copilot can even generate code from plain English comments or queries, such as “Create a function that adds two numbers” or “How do I sort a list in Python?”. It’s amazing, isn’t it?

How does Copilot integrate with Power BI?

Power BI is a powerful data analysis and visualisation platform that enables you to connect to various data sources, transform and model your data, create interactive reports and dashboards, and share your insights with others. Power BI also supports custom visuals and extensions that can enhance your data experience.

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Power BI, Power BI Desktop, Power BI Desktop RS, Power BI Governance, Power BI Service, Self-Service BI

Good Practice: Use Security Groups in Role Mapping Instead of User Accounts in Power BI Row Level Security (RLS)

Row-level security (RLS) is a feature of Power BI that allows you to restrict data access for different users based on filters you define within roles. For example, you can create a role for Sales Managers and apply a filter that only shows them the sales data for their region. This way, you can ensure that each user only sees the data that is relevant and appropriate for them.

However, managing RLS roles can be challenging if you have a large number of users or if your user base changes frequently. You need to manually assign each user account to one or more roles, which can be time-consuming and error-prone. Moreover, if a user changes their position or leaves the organisation, you must update their role membership accordingly.

This is where Security Groups become handy. Security groups are collections of user accounts that share common characteristics or permissions. You can create security groups on your Azure Active Directory (AAD) or Microsoft 365 Admin Centre and add users based on their roles or responsibilities. For instance, you can create a security group for each sales region and add all the sales managers who belong to that region.

By using security groups in Power BI RLS role mapping, you can simplify and, somehow, automate the process of RLS management. Instead of adding individual user accounts to roles, you can add security groups as members of roles. This way, you only need to maintain the membership of security groups once, and Power BI will automatically apply the RLS filters to all the users within those groups.

Using security groups in role mapping has several benefits. The following are the top four:

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DAX, Power BI, Power BI Desktop, Power BI Service, Power Query

Datatype Conversion in Power Query Affects Data Modeling in Power BI

In my consulting experience working with customers using Power BI, many challenges that Power BI developers face are due to negligence to data types. Here are some common challenges that are the direct or indirect results of inappropriate data types and data type conversion:

Getting incorrect results while all calculations in your data model are correct.
Poor performing data model.
Bloated model size.
Difficulties in configuring user-defined aggregations (agg awareness).
Difficulties in setting up incremental data refresh.
Getting blank visuals after the first data refresh in Power BI service.

In this blogpost, I explain the common pitfalls to prevent future challenges that can be time-consuming to identify and fix.

Background

Before we dive into the topic of this blog post, I would like to start with a bit of background. We all know that Power BI is not only a reporting tool. It is indeed a data platform supporting various aspects of business intelligence, data engineering, and data science. There are two languages we must learn to be able to work with Power BI: Power Query (M) and DAX. The purpose of the two languages is quite different. We use Power Query for data transformation and data preparation, while DAX is used for data analysis in the Tabular data model. Here is the point, the two languages in Power BI have different data types.

The most common Power BI development scenarios start with connecting to the data source(s). Power BI supports hundreds of data sources. Most data source connections happen in Power Query (the data preparation layer in a Power BI solution) unless we connect live to a semantic layer such as an SSAS instance or a Power BI dataset. Many supported data sources have their own data types, and some don’t. For instance, SQL Server has its own data types, but CSV doesn’t. When the data source has data types, the mashup engine tries to identify data types to the closest data type available in Power Query. Even though the source system has data types, the data types might not be compatible with Power Query data types. For the data sources that do not support data types, the matchup engine tries to detect the data types based on the sample data loaded into the data preview pane in the Power Query Editor window. But, there is no guarantee that the detected data types are correct. So, it is best practice to validate the detected data types anyway.

Power BI uses the Tabular model data types when it loads the data into the data model. The data types in the data model may or may not be compatible with the data types defined in Power Query. For instance, Power Query has a Binary data type, but the Tabular model does not.

The following table shows Power Query’s datatypes, their representations in the Power Query Editor’s UI, their mapping data types in the data model (DAX), and the internal data types in the xVelocity (Tabular model) engine:

Power Query and DAX (data model) data type mapping

As the above table shows, in Power Query’s UI, Whole Number, Decimal, Fixed Decimal and Percentage are all in type number in the Power Query engine. The type names in the Power BI UI also differ from their equivalents in the xVelocity engine. Let us dig deeper.

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Dataflows, Power BI, Power BI Service, Power Query

Endorsement in Power BI, Part 2, How to Endorse?

In the previous post I explained the basic concepts around endorsement in Power BI. We discussed that users’ ability to collaborate in creating and sharing artifacts is one of the key aspects of users’ experience in Power BI. But it would be hard, if not impossible, to identify the quality of the artifact without a mechanism to identify the artifact’s quality in large organisations. Endorsement is the answer to this challenge. We discussed the following in the previous post:

In this post, I explain the following:

How do Power BI administrators enable certification and grant rights to security groups?

In the previous post, we discussed that a Power BI administrator must enable certification and grant sufficient rights to the security groups. Therefore, all members of the specified security group are authorised to certify the artifacts. If you are a Power BI administrator, follow these steps to do so:

After logging into Power BI Service, click the Settings button
Click Admin Portal
From the Tenant settings, scroll down to find the Export and sharing settings
Find and expand the Certification setting
Enable certification
Put the certification process documentation URL (if any)
It is not recommended to enable this feature for the entire organisation. So, select the Specific security groups option
Type the security group name and select it from the list
Click the Apply button

The following image shows the above steps:

Enabling certification from the Admin Portal in Power BI Service

It may take up to 15 minutes for the changes to go through. After that, all the members of the specified security can certify the artifacts. In the next section, we see how to certify the supported artifacts.

Note

Everyone who has “write” permission on the Workspace containing the artifact can promote it. Therefore, the users or security groups with one of the Admin, Member, or Contributor roles in the Workspace can promote the artifacts.

However, one should not promote the artifacts just because he/she can. The organisations usually have a promotion process to follow, but the boundaries around promoting are often much more relaxed than certifying it.

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Category: Power BI Service

Copilot for Power BI, What Does it Mean for Power BI Development?

What is Copilot, and how does it work?

How does Copilot integrate with Power BI?

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Good Practice: Use Security Groups in Role Mapping Instead of User Accounts in Power BI Row Level Security (RLS)

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Datatype Conversion in Power Query Affects Data Modeling in Power BI

Background

Like this:

Endorsement in Power BI, Part 2, How to Endorse?

How do Power BI administrators enable certification and grant rights to security groups?

Like this:

What is Copilot, and how does it work?

How does Copilot integrate with Power BI?

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Background

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How do Power BI administrators enable certification and grant rights to security groups?

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