Tag: M

Business Intelligence - BI, Dataflows, Power BI, Power BI Premium Capacity, Power BI Service, Power Query, Self-Service BI

Quick Tips: How to Enable Dataflows In Power BI Service

Dataflows in Power BI Service

Dataflows (Preview) in Power BI Service has been landed yesterday (6th November 2018). I had a little bit of difficulties to enable this cool new feature so I thought it is good to write a Quick tip about it. While Dataflows is under preveiw at the time of writing this quick tip, the situation may be totally different in the future.

Straight away, fully featured Dataflows is available in a Power BI Premium capacity or in a Power BI Embedded Capacity, but, while this is still in preview, you can take advantage of limited features available in your Power BI Pro license. Features like “Linked entities from other dataflows” or “Computed Entities”, like merging tables to a new table, are not available in a Power BI Pro license.

Dataflows Computed Entities

Enabling Dataflows

  • After sign in to Power BI Service click “Settings”
  • Click “Admin Portal”

Power BI Service Admin Portal

  • Select Capacity type you are in, either Premium or Embedded
  • Click on a desired capacity that you’d like to enable Dataflows

Managing a Premium Capacity in Power BI Admin Portal

  • Scroll down to find and click “Workloads” under “More Options”
  • Enable “Dataflows (Preview)”
  • If you stick to the default “Max Memory (%)” value that is set to 20 you’ll get an error message saying “There was an issue updating your workload setting. Try again in a little while”. The error message is not helpful at all. The reason you get the error message is that the “Max Memory (%)” value must be a number between 27 to 100 while the default is 20.

Enabling Dataflows in Power BI Service Continue reading “Quick Tips: How to Enable Dataflows In Power BI Service” →

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

Using Unicode Characters in Power BI

Unicode Characters in Power BI

There are several scenarios to use Unicode characters in Power BI including but not limited to:

  • Creating simple KPI columns in Table or Matrix visuals
  • To show the status of a measure more visually like using starts
  • Using Unicode characters as icons in your reports representing the subject

Chris Webb explained some of the above scenarios here.

In this post I explain how you can use Power BI as a tool to generate almost all valid Unicode characters in Power BI. You can download the PBIT at the bottom of this post. Then you can copy the Unicode characters from Power BI and use them in all textual parts of your report like visual titles, text boxes and so on.

The Unicode planes start from 0 to 1,114,111 which is decimal equivalent of 0 to 10FFFF in hexadecimal numeral system. For more information on Unicode planes check this out.

So, a simple way to generate all possible Unicode characters is to generate a list of decimal numbers starting from 0 ending at 1,114,111. This way we generate a series of decimal numbers regardless of the gaps between starting and ending Unicode blocks. Then using UNICHAR() function in DAX to generate corresponding Unicode characters. With the following DAX expression you can easily generate a list and the corresponding Unicode characters: Continue reading “Using Unicode Characters in Power BI” →

Business Intelligence - BI, DAX, Power BI, Power BI Desktop, Power BI Documenter, Power Query

What is Power BI Documenter

Power BI Documenter Logo (Small)

On Saturday, 9th June 2018, we announced the existence of Power BI Documenter. As the name resembles, Power BI Documenter is a tool to help individuals and businesses to document their Power BI Desktop models. Everyone who already have several Power BI Desktop reports probably realized that documenting the solutions is not as easy as how creating a report in Power BI Desktop is. The issue is more visible in larger organisations with several Power BI Developers who are busy enough with a big list of tasks that are assigned to them on a day to day basis. Therefore, there is no time left to take care of the documentation. Every IT expert knows how important is to have proper documentation. We at Data Vizioner decided to do something tangible about this issue. So we started the project several months ago with the vision of creating web app to help individuals and businesses to keep their Power BI documentation on track. In this post I’m not going to explain how you can easily start documenting your Power BI Desktop reports using Power BI Documenter. You can learn more about Power BI Documenter and how to use it here. Despite the fact that the current version of Power BI Documenter is the very first version of the app with lots of limitations, it indeed can help users with their Power BI documentation tasks. All you need to do is to export the Power BI Desktop files (PBIX) to Power BI Template format (PBIT) and upload it to Power BI Documenter web app. Continue reading “What is Power BI Documenter” →

Azure, Azure Analysis Services, BISM Tabular, Business Intelligence - BI, Data Warehousing - DW, DAX, Power BI, Power BI Desktop, Power Query, SQL Server, SQL Server Analysis Services - SSAS, T-SQL

Time Dimension in Power BI and SSAS Tabular Model Supporting Minutes Time Bands

2018-05-23 12_58_48-Symbols (Open in Visio).vsdx - Visio Professional

Date dimension has been discussed quite a lot on the Internet and you can find lots of valuable articles around it here and there. But what if you need to analyse your data in time level? A customer has a requirement to analyse their data in Minutes level. This means that the granularity of the fact table would be at minute level. So, if they store the data in their transactional database in seconds level, then we need to aggregate that data to minutes level. I don’t want to go there, just bear in mind that the granularity of your fact table is something that you must think about at the very first steps. In most cases, if not all cases, you’d be better to have a separate Time dimension. Then you need to have a TimeID or Time column in your fact table to be able to create a relationship between the Time dimension and the fact table. In this post I show you two ways to create Time dimension in Power BI:

  • Creating Time dimension with DAX
  • Creating Time dimension with Power Query (M)

Alternatively, you can take care of the Time dimension in the source system like SQL Server. Continue reading and you’ll find a T-SQL codes as complementary.

The techniques that I explain here can be done in SSAS Tabular model and Azure Analysis Services as well.

Requirements:

To follow the steps of building the test model you need to have:

  • Power BI Desktop: Download the latest version from here
  • A sample fact table containing time or datetime. I modified FactInternetSales from AdventureWorksDW and made it available for you to download in Excel format (find the download link at the bottom of the post)

Continue reading “Time Dimension in Power BI and SSAS Tabular Model Supporting Minutes Time Bands” →