I’d like to thank you all for attending the webinar held on 30th September 2016. I talked about some amazing under cover aspects of Power BI Desktop model. In this session you learnt:
In the previous posts, here and here, I explained how you can use Power BI Desktop Query Parameters for many different use cases. Power BI development team added another cool feature to Power BI Desktop on July 2016 which is the ability to add a List Query output to a query parameter as it’s “Suggested Values” (formerly “Allowed Values”). This feature is very useful and from now on we are not restricted to proviode a static list of values in “Manage Parameters”. In this post I show you how to use a list output in query parameters.
Note: This feature is NOT available in DirectQuery mode at the time of writing this post.
Requirements
In this post as usual I’ll connect to a SQL Server database as a sample. To be able to follow this post you have to have:
In the first post of these series I explained how to create dynamic data sources using Query Parameters. You also learnt how to use Query Parameters in Filter Rows. But, what if we want to filter query results based on the values of a column from a particular table? Previously we couldn’t answer these sort of questions if we want to filter FactInternetSales based on a selected values of EnglishProductName column from DimProductCategories using Query Parameters. But, now we can easily implement those sort of scenarios.
Let’s implement this scenario.
Loading Data into the Model:
Open Power BI Desktop
Get data from SQL Server and connect to Adventure Works DW 2016 CTP3
Select “FactInternetSales”, “DimProduct”, “DimProductSubCategory” and “DimProductCategory” tables then click “Load”
Switch to “Relationships” view to make sure the relationships detected correctly then click “Edit Queries” from the ribbon
One of the most powerful features in Power BI and Excel is supporting geospatial visualisations. In Excel we can use Map visualisation in Power View, or use Power Map directly. In Power BI, as you know, there are two built-in visualisations supporting geographic coordinate data, Map and Filled map. They work beautifully if you have enough data supported by Bing Maps. But, there are some issues with Map visualisations in both Power BI and Excel. In this post I address some of the issues I faced myself and I’ll provide the solutions for the issues. As “Filled Map” and “Map” visualisations in Power BI are very similar my focus in this post would be on “Map” visualisation. My intention is not explaining Power View and Power Map that much so my focus in this article would be on Power BI more than the other two.
Requirements
To experiment everything I explain in this post you need to have:
The new SQL Server sample, WideWorldImportersDW (WWI). You can download it here
The latest version on Power BI Desktop (current version is 2.35.4399.381 64-bit (May 2016))
Select Fact.Sales and Dimension.City then load data
Map Issues In Power BI
Wrong Cities in Power BI
Expand the “Dimension City” table
Select “City” column then change its Data Category to City (Data Category is on “Modeling” tab from the ribbon)
Put a Map visual into the page
Put “City” on Location
Put “Total Excluding Tax” on Size
As you see sales distributed across different countries, but, this is not quiet right.
Put a slicer on the page then put “Country” on the slicer
Click “United States” to filter the Map
Oops! This is not quiet right. What happened is that Bing Map Engine gets confused with the city names so that it shows a city with the same name outside of the US, just like New Plymouth which a city in New Zealand, but, the New Plymouth we have in our data source is the New Plymouth from Idaho in the US.
Update July 2020: While this method still works with Power BI Desktop June 2017 release and SSAS 2017, it potentially doesn’t work with the later versions of Power BI Desktop (Jul 2020) and SSAS 2019 as there are new DAX functions that are available in the Power BI Desktop but not in SSAS 2019. So use this method as an experimental method AT YOUR OWN RISK!
Have you created a robust model in Power BI Desktop and you are looking for a way to import it to an instance of SQL Server Analysis Services Tabular? Hmm, it would be highly beneficial if you could import Power BI model to SSAS Tabular and it potentially saves lots of development time and costs. The good news is that with SQL Server 2016 and SQL Server Data Tools for Visual Studio 2015 it is possible. In this post I show you how to import Power BI Desktop model to SSAS Tabular 2016. Unfortunately, you cannot do the job in any prior versions of SQL Server, SQL Server Management Studio or SSDT.
