Category: Power BI

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” →

BISM Tabular, Business Intelligence - BI, Dynamic Management Views (DMV), Power BI, Quick Tips, SQL Server

Quick Tips: Boolean Conditions when Querying SSAS DMVs

Boolean Comparison in SSAS DMVs, Error: A Boolean expression is not allowed in the context

If you are querying SSAS DMVs you may want to add some conditions in the query.

Something like getting all active relationships, perhaps like below:

select * from $SYSTEM.TMSCHEMA_RELATIONSHIPS where IsActive = 'true'

Running the above query on an instance of SSAS Tabular gives you the following error message:

Error: A Boolean expression is not allowed in the context …

Fixing this is quite easy, run the below query to get active relationships:

select * from $SYSTEM.TMSCHEMA_RELATIONSHIPS where IsActive

Boolean Comparison in SSAS DMVs

And to get inactive relationships run this one:

select * from $SYSTEM.TMSCHEMA_RELATIONSHIPS where not IsActive

Boolean Comparison in SSAS DMVs

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, Quick Tips

Quick Tips: Keyboard Shortcuts/Hotkeys When Writing DAX in Power BI Desktop

DAX Keyboard Shortcuts in Power BI Desktop

Keyboard shortcuts is an interesting topic for developes that can really improve your report development in Power BI Desktop. In this post I show you some keyboard shortcuts/hotkeys when writing DAX in Power BI Desktop.

 

  • Indend right: Ctrl + ]
  • Indent left: Ctrl + [

Mini-tip: You can also indent your code to ther right by pressing TAB or indent left by pressing Shift + TAB. But, the difference is that if your cursor is in the middle of a line, when you press TAB it divides your code to two pieces and indends the characters to the right from the position that cursor is in.

  • New line keep indent: Shift + Enter
  • New line starting from first of line: Alt + Enter
  • Activate Intellicence: Ctrl + Space
  • Comment multiple lines: Ctrl + KC or Ctrl + /
  • Uncomment multiple lines: Ctrl + KU or Ctrl + /
  • Move the current line up/down: Alt + Up/Down Arrow Key
  • Enter multiple lines of code at once: Ctrl + Alt + Up/Down Arrow Key
  • Find and replace a word: Ctrl + D to highlight the current word, Ctrl + D again to find/highligh the same next word. Continue pressing Ctrl + D to find/highlight all same words, then start typing to replace all words at once
  • Find and replace all of a kind at once: Ctrl + Shift + L to highlight a part of your DAX expression then start typing to replace the highlighted words at once

Continue reading “Quick Tips: Keyboard Shortcuts/Hotkeys When Writing DAX in Power BI Desktop” →