Tag: PowerBI

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

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” →

Business Intelligence - BI, On-premises Data Gateway Enterprise Mode, On-premises Data Gateway Personal Mode, Power BI, Power BI Desktop, Power BI Service, SQL Server

Export Power BI Service Data to SQL Server

 

Update 2021 March:

You can now export the data directly from Power BI Desktop using my tool, Power BI Exporter. Read more here.

Update 2019 April:

If you’re interested in exporting the data model from Power BI Service to SQL Server check this out.

A while ago I wrote a blog post explaining how to Export Power BI Data to SQL Server with R. In that post I explained how to get the job done in Power BI Desktop using R scripts. In this post I explain how to export Power BI Service data to SQL server. YES! You can export data from Power BI service to a SQL Server database sitting in your on-premises environment. Keep reading to see how.

How It Works?

This is going to be a short post as I already covered the first part of the process in my other post on Export Power BI Data to SQL Server with R. So in this post I show you how to use the Power BI Desktop file you already created using the method explained in that blog post to export your Power BI Service data to an on-premises instance of SQL Server. All you need to do is to

  • Publish the existing Power BI Desktop solution to Power BI Service
  • Install On-premises Data Gateway in PERSONAL MODE

Note: R is NOT supported by the current version (Version Number: 14.16.6614.5) of the On-premises Data Gateway in Enterprise Mode.

After you successfully published the model to Power BI Service you’ll notice that you cannot refresh the model if you don’t install the On-premises Data Gateway in Personal Mode.

To see the dataset settings:

Continue reading “Export Power BI Service Data to SQL Server” →
BISM Tabular, Business Intelligence - BI, DAX, Power BI, Power BI Desktop, Power Pivot, Power Query, Self-Service BI, SQL Server 2016

Creating Custom Table in SSAS Tabular using Table and Row Constructors in DAX

A while ago I was working on a Power BI project which the customer wanted to define a new table directly in the model. The easiest way to achieve this in Power BI Desktop is to “Enter Data” which creates a new table by typing or pasting in new contents. I was thinking of that project the other day and thought, hey, how we can do the same in SSAS Tabular when there is no Power Query (M) language available in SSAS Tabular 2016. The good news is that Power Query will be available in the next version of SSAS Tabular in SQL Server vNext. But, until then a workaround would be entering data to a CSV file then load it to the model. Another way is to implement custom tables in DAX in SQL Server 2016 Tabular models using Table and Row Constructors. In this post I show you a way of creating custom table in SSAS Tabular using table constructors in DAX. You can do the same in Power BI as the same principle applies. Therefore, in case you’d prefer not to use “Enter Data” feature which effectively uses Power Query to create a new table in Power BI Desktop, then you can use DAX to do the same.

Requirements

If don’t already have SQL Server 2016 it’s probably time to download and install it. I use AdventureWorksDW as sample database in this article.

Scenario

You are involved with an SSAS Tabular project and the customer asked for a report in Power BI with dynamic Card so that the values shown in the Card visual should dynamically change based on selected measure from a slicer. You have several different measures in the model and the customer wants to show some of them dynamically in only one Card visual. Consider you have the following measures to be shown in the Card:

  • Total Internet Sales
  • Internet Sales in 2014
  • Total Number of Internet Sales Transactions

You have to create a logic so that the users can selected any of the above measures to show in a single Card visual.

How it works

After you meet the requirements, you’re good to start implementing the above scenario in SQL Server Data Tool (SSDT). Creating a calculated table in SSAS Tabular 2016 is fairly easy. All we need to do is to create a custom table with two columns. One column stores friendly names for measures and the other one holds DAX expressions for the measures. As you might have noticed, I’m talking about creating a custom table in DAX and populating it with values. Continue reading to see how. What we are going to do is to create a calculated table using table constructors in DAX. Table and Row Constructors weren’t available in previous versions of DAX in SSAS Tabular. They are very similar to Lists or a list of Tuples just like what we have in MDX.

I’ll explain this later when we created our sample model in SSDT.

Continue reading “Creating Custom Table in SSAS Tabular using Table and Row Constructors in DAX” →