Quick Tips: Find Power BI Desktop Local Port Number with Model Explorer

Quick Tips: Find Power BI Desktop Local Port Number with Model Explorer

In March 2018, I wrote a blogpost called Four Different Ways to Find Your Power BI Desktop Local Port Number. Last week, Zoe Doughlas from Microsoft left a comment reminding me of a fifth method to get the port which encouraged me to write this quick tip. Thanks to Zoe!

As the name suggests, the blog was about finding Power BI Desktop’s local port number. If you do not have any clue what I mean by local port number, I strongly suggest reading that blog.

This blog focuses on yet another method that wasn’t available back then. Indeed, it is a new feature added to the October 2023 release of Power BI Desktop. This is a Quick Tip so let’s jump straight to the topic and learn how we find the port number (and more) in Power BI Desktop (Oct 2023 and later releases).

Prerequisites

As mentioned, this new feature was added to Power BI Desktop’s October 2023; therefore, we must install that release on our local machine. Indeed, the October 2023 release was packed with many other features, including the Model Explorer (the topic of this blog) and the ability to define calculation groups directly in Power BI Desktop. Many of these features are still in preview; hence, they require enabling.

The following few steps explain how to enable Preview Features in Power BI Desktop:

  1. Open Power BI Desktop and click Settings (the gear icon) from the right pane
  2. On the Options page, from the GLOBAL section, click the Preview features tab
  3. Enable the desired features; for this blog, we need the Model explorer and Calculation group authoring
  4. Click OK

The following image shows the above steps:

Enabling Preview Features in Power BI Desktop
Enabling Preview Features in Power BI Desktop

Depending on the selected features, you may need to restart your Power BI Desktop to allow them to enable.

Looking at the above image, some of you may ask “Soheil, are you using an older version of Power BI Desktop?” and I am glad you asked. The answer as always is “It depends”. And, this time it depends on the timing of writing this blog which is early December 2023, and the fact that Power BI Desktop November 2023 was released a couple of weeks ago, therefore, Power BI Desktop October 2023 is kind of OLD! And, YES! I installed Power BI Desktop Nov 2023 for the sake of writing this blogpost.

Continue reading “Quick Tips: Find Power BI Desktop Local Port Number with Model Explorer”

Dynamically Passing Parameters to a SQL Stored Procedure in Excel 365 Using Power Query

In September 2014, I wrote a blog post on dynamically passing parameters from PowerPivot to a SQL Server stored procedure using VBA. Back then, VBA was a real lifesaver. It perhaps still is for many of us. But frankly, I even forgot how to write VBA. Maybe it is time to look at it again. I also wrote a quick tip in August 2020 about doing a similar thing in Power BI using Query Parameters. Check it out if you’re keen to know how it works in Power BI.

Eight years later, one of my weblog readers asked how to do the same thing in later versions of Excel; he is specifically asking for Excel 2019. I thought it would be good to cover this topic after 8 years and see how it works now. So, here it is, a new blog post.

The Problem

From time to time, Excel users require to get the data from a SQL Server stored procedure. The stored procedures usually accept some input parameters and return the results. But how can we dynamically pass values to the stored procedures from cells in Excel to SQL Server?

Prerequisites

For this blog post, I use SQL Server 2019 and Microsoft’s famous sample database, AdventureWorks2019. You can find Microsoft’s other sample databases here. I also use Excel 365, it should work the same way in Excel 2019, though.

The Solution

I discuss two approaches to overcome the challenge. Both approaches use Power Query slightly differently. In both approaches, we parameterise the SQL Statement of the SQL Server connector, passing the values to the parameters from an Excel table. One approach requires ignoring the Privacy Levels in Power Query, while the other does not. Both approaches work, but, depending on your preferences, you may prefer one over the other.

As mentioned, I use the AdventureWorks2019 sample database that contains a couple of stored procedures. I use the dbo.uspGetBillOfMaterials stored procedure accepting two parameters, @StartProductID and @CheckDate.

Approach 1: Parameterising the SQL connector’s SQL Statements, Ignoring Privacy Levels

Follow these steps to pass the parameters’ values from an Excel sheet to the stored procedure and get the results in Excel:

  1. In Excel, navigate to the Data tab
  2. Click the Get Data dropdown
  3. Hover over the From Database option and click the From SQL Server Database
  4. Enter the Server
  5. Enter the Database
  6. Expand the Advanced options
  7. Type EXEC [dbo].[uspGetBillOfMaterials] @StartProductID = 727, @CheckDate = N'2013-01-01' in the SQL statement textbox
  8. Click OK
Using SQL Statement in Power Query for Excel
Using SQL Statement in Power Query for Excel
  1. Click the dropdown on the Load button
  2. Click Load to
Load to Options to Load the Results of Power Query query into an Excel Sheet or PowerPivot Model

From here, we have some options to load the results either into an Excel sheet or the PowerPivot data model. We want to load the data into the PowerPivot data model in this example.

  1. Select Only Create Connection
  2. Check the Add this data to the Data Model option
  3. Click OK
Loading the Power Query Data into PowerPivot in Excel
Loading the Power Query Data into PowerPivot in Excel
Continue reading “Dynamically Passing Parameters to a SQL Stored Procedure in Excel 365 Using Power Query”

Incremental Refresh in Power BI, Part 1: Implementation in Power BI Desktop

Incremental-Refresh-in-Power-BI-Part-1-Implementation-in-Power-BI-Desktop

Incremental refresh, or IR, refers to loading the data incrementally, which has been around in the world of ETL for data warehousing for a long time. Let us discuss incremental refresh (or incremental data loading) in a simple language to better understand how it works.

From a data movement standpoint, there are always two options when we transfer data from location A to location B:

  1. Truncation and load: We transfer the data as a whole from location A to location B. If location B has some data already, we entirely truncate the location B and reload the whole data from location A to B
  2. Incremental load: We transfer the data as a whole from location A to location B just once for the first time. The next time, we only load the data changes from A to B. In this approach, we never truncate B. Instead, we only transfer the data that exists in A but not in B

When we refresh the data in Power BI, we use the first approach, truncation and load, if we have not configured an incremental refresh. In Power BI, the first approach only applies to tables with Import or Dual storage modes. Previously, the Incremental load was available only in the tables with either Import or Dual storage modes. But the new announcement from Microsoft about Hybrid Tables greatly affects how Incremental load works. With the Hybrid Tables, the Incremental load is available on a portion of the table when a specific partition is in Direct Query mode, while the rest of the partitions are in Import storage mode.

Incremental refresh used to be available only on Premium capacities, but from Feb 2020 onwards, it is also available in Power BI Pro with some limitations. However, the Hybrid Tables are currently available on Power BI Premium Capacity and Premium Per User (PPU), not Pro. Let’s hope that Microsft will change its licensing plan for the Hybrid Tables in the future and make it available in Pro.

I will write about Hybrid Tables in a future blog post.

When we successfully configure the incremental refresh policies in Power BI, we always have two ranges of data; the historical range and the incremental range. The historical range includes all data processed in the past, and the incremental range is the current range of data to process. Incremental refresh in Power BI always looks for data changes in the incremental range, not the historical range. Therefore, the incremental refresh will not notice any changes in the historical data. When we talk about the data changes, we are referring to new rows inserted, updated or deleted, however, the incremental refresh detects updated rows as deleting the rows and inserting new rows of data.

Benefits of Incremental Refresh

Configuring incremental refresh is beneficial for large tables with hundreds of millions of rows. The following are some benefits of configuring incremental refresh in Power BI:

  • The data refreshes much faster than when we truncate and load the data as the incremental refresh only refreshes the incremental range
  • The data refresh process is less resource-intensive than refreshing the entire data all the time
  • The data refresh is less expensive and more maintainable than the non-incremental refreshes over large tables
  • The incremental refresh is inevitable when dealing with massive datasets with billions of rows that do not fit into our data model in Power BI Desktop. Remember, Power BI uses in-memory data processing engine; therefore, it is improbable that our local machine can handle importing billions of rows of data into the memory

Now that we understand the basic concepts of the incremental refresh, let us see how it works in Power BI.

Implementing Incremental Refresh Policies with Power BI Desktop

We currently can configure incremental refresh in the Power BI Desktop and in Dataflows contained in a Premium Workspace. This blog post looks at the incremental refresh implementation within the Power BI Desktop.

After successfully implementing the incremental refresh policies with the desktop, we publish the model to Power BI Service. The first data refresh takes longer as we transfer all data from the data source(s) to Power BI Service for the first time. After the first load, all future data refreshes will be incremental.

How to Implement Incremental Refresh

Implementing incremental refresh in Power BI is simple. There are two generic parts of the implementation:

  1. Preparing some prerequisites in Power Query and defining incremental policies in the data model
  2. Publishing the model to Power BI Service and refreshing the dataset

Let’s briefly get to some more details to quickly understand how the implementation works.

  • Preparing Prerequisites in Power Query
    • We require to define two parameters with DateTime data type in Power Query Editor. The names for the two parameters are RangeStart and RangeEnd, which are reserved for defining incremental refresh policies. As you know, Power Query is case-sensitive, so the names of the parameters must be RangeStart and RangeEnd.
    • The next step is to filter the table by a DateTime column using the RangeStart and RangeEnd parameters when the value of the DateTime column is between RangeStart and RangeEnd.

Notes

  • The data type of the parameters must be DateTime
  • The datat tpe of the column we use for incremental refresh must be Int64 (integer) Date or DateTime.Therefore, for scenarios that our table has a smart date key instead of Date or DateTime, we have to convert the RangeStart and RangeEnd parameters to Int64
  • When we filter a table using the RangeStart and RangeEnd parameters, Power BI uses the filter on the DateTime column for creating partitions on the table. So it is important to pay attention to the DateTime ranges when filtering the values so that only one filter condition must have an “equal to” on RangeStart or RangeEnd, not both
Continue reading “Incremental Refresh in Power BI, Part 1: Implementation in Power BI Desktop”

Quick Tips: Export Power BI Desktop and Power BI Service Model Data In One-Shot with DAX Studio

Exporting Model Data to CSV 
or SQL Server in One Shot

Update 2021 March:

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

In some of my old posts, which are the most popular ones, I explained how to Export data Power BI Desktop or Power BI Service data to different destinations like CSV, Excel and SQL Server. In this quick tip I explain a very easy way to export the model data as a whole to either CSV or SQL Server with DAX Studio.

Daniil from XXL BI well explained this method, but I’d rather quickly explain how it works and add some more information.

After release 2.8 of DAX Studio, you can now quickly export the whole model to CSV and SQL Server in one shot.

Enabling Export All Data in DAX Studio

  • Open DAX Studio
  • Click “File”
  • Click “Options”
  • Click “Advanced”
  • Tick “Show Export All Data button”
DAX Studio Export Power BI Model Data Settings

Export Power BI Model Data to CSV

DAX Studio Export Power BI Model Data to CSV
Continue reading “Quick Tips: Export Power BI Desktop and Power BI Service Model Data In One-Shot with DAX Studio”