Tag: Report

Dataflows, Power BI, Power BI Service, Power Query

Endorsement in Power BI, Part 2, How to Endorse?

Endorsement in Power BI, Part 2, How to Endorse?

In the previous post I explained the basic concepts around endorsement in Power BI. We discussed that users’ ability to collaborate in creating and sharing artifacts is one of the key aspects of users’ experience in Power BI. But it would be hard, if not impossible, to identify the quality of the artifact without a mechanism to identify the artifact’s quality in large organisations. Endorsement is the answer to this challenge. We discussed the following in the previous post:

In this post, I explain the following:

How do Power BI administrators enable certification and grant rights to security groups?

In the previous post, we discussed that a Power BI administrator must enable certification and grant sufficient rights to the security groups. Therefore, all members of the specified security group are authorised to certify the artifacts. If you are a Power BI administrator, follow these steps to do so:

  1. After logging into Power BI Service, click the Settings button
  2. Click Admin Portal
  3. From the Tenant settings, scroll down to find the Export and sharing settings
  4. Find and expand the Certification setting
  5. Enable certification
  6. Put the certification process documentation URL (if any)
  7. It is not recommended to enable this feature for the entire organisation. So, select the Specific security groups option
  8. Type the security group name and select it from the list
  9. Click the Apply button

The following image shows the above steps:

Enabling certification from the Admin Portal in Power BI Service
Enabling certification from the Admin Portal in Power BI Service

It may take up to 15 minutes for the changes to go through. After that, all the members of the specified security can certify the artifacts. In the next section, we see how to certify the supported artifacts.

Note

Everyone who has “write” permission on the Workspace containing the artifact can promote it. Therefore, the users or security groups with one of the Admin, Member, or Contributor roles in the Workspace can promote the artifacts.

However, one should not promote the artifacts just because he/she can. The organisations usually have a promotion process to follow, but the boundaries around promoting are often much more relaxed than certifying it.

Continue reading “Endorsement in Power BI, Part 2, How to Endorse?” →
Dataflows, Power BI, Power BI Service, Power Query

Endorsement in Power BI, Part 1, The Basics

Content Endorsement in Power BI, Part 1, The Basics

As you may already know, Power BI is not a report-authoring tool only. Indeed, it is much more than that. Power BI is an all-around data platform supporting many aspects you’d expect from such a platform. You can ingest the data from various data sources, transform it, model it, visualise and share it with others. Read more about what Power BI is here.

One of the key aspects of users’ experience in Power BI is their ability to collaborate in creating and sharing artifacts, making it an easy-to-use and convenient platform. But the convenience comes with the cost of having a lot of shared artifacts in large organisations raising concerns about the artifact’s quality and trustworthiness. It would be hard, if not impossible, to identify the quality of the artifacts without a mechanism to identify the quality of the artifacts. Endorsement is the answer to this.

In this series of blog posts, I answer the following questions:

But before we start, we need to know what content means in Power BI.

What does Content Mean in Power BI?

Update:
Microsoft lately updated the “Content” terminology, which is slightly different from when I wrote this blog. So I replaced content with artifact that is a more generic term. While the term content is not relevant to the topic anymore, I decided to keep this section explaining what content means in Power BI.

When we use the term Content in the context of Power BI, we refer to the artifacts related to visuals in Power BI Service. We currently have the following artifacts in Power BI:

From those artifacts, the Reports, Dashboards and Apps are Contents.

Continue reading “Endorsement in Power BI, Part 1, The Basics” →
Data Visualisation, Power BI, Power BI Desktop, Power BI Service

Thin Reports, What Are They, Why Should I Care and How Can I Create Them?

Thin Reports in Power BI

Shared Datasets have been around for quite a while now. In June 2019, Microsoft announced a new feature called Shared and Certified Datasets with the mindset of supporting enterprise-grade BI within the Power BI ecosystem. In essence, the shared dataset feature allows organisations to have a single source of truth across the organisation serving many reports.

A Thin Report is a report that connects to an existing dataset on Power BI Service using the Connect Live connectivity mode. So, we basically have multiple reports connected to a single dataset. Now that we know what a thin report is, let’s see why it is best practice to follow this approach.

Prior to the Shared and Certified Datasets announcement, we used to create separate reports in Power BI Desktop and publish those reports into Power BI Service. This approach had many disadvantages, such as:

  • Having many disparate islands of data instead of a single source of truth.
  • Consuming more storage on Power BI Service by having repetitive table across many datasets
  • Reducing collaboration between data modellers and report creators (contributors) as Power BI Desktop is not a multi-user application.
  • The reports were strictly connected to the underlying dataset so it is so hard, if not totally impossible, to decouple a report from a dataset and connect it to a different dataset. This was pretty restrictive for the developers to follow the Dev/Test/Prod approach.
  • If we had a fairly large report with many pages, say more than 20 pages, then again, it was almost impossible to break the report down into some smaller and more business-centric reports.
  • Putting too much load on the data sources connected to many disparate datasets. The situation gets even worst when we schedule multiple refreshes a day. In some cases the data refresh process put exclusive locks on the the source system that can potentially cause many issues down the road.
  • Having many datasets and reports made it harder and more expensive to maintain the solution.

In my previous blog, I explained the different components of a Business Intelligence solution and how they map to the Power BI ecosystem. In that post, I mentioned that the Power BI Service Datasets map to a Semantic Layer in a Business Intelligence solution. So, when we create a Power BI report with Power BI Desktop and publish the report to the Power BI Service, we create a semantic layer with a report connected to it altogether. By creating many disparate reports in Power BI Desktop and publishing them to the Power BI Service, we are indeed creating many semantic layers with many repeated tables on top of our data which does not make much sense.

On the other hand, having some shared datasets with many connected thin reports makes a lot of sense. This approach covers all the disadvantages of the previous development method; in addition, it decreases the confusion for report writers around the datasets they are connecting to, it helps with storage management in Power BI Service, and it is easier to comply with security and privacy concerns.

Continue reading “Thin Reports, What Are They, Why Should I Care and How Can I Create Them?” →
Business Intelligence - BI, Power BI, Power BI Desktop, Power BI Service, Quick Tips

Quick Tips: How to Quickly Switch Between Report Pages in Power BI

Navigating between Report Pages in Power BI

If you have a lot of report pages in your Power BI reports you already realised that it is such a pain to click the left/right buttons to navigate through different pages. Well, you can simply right click on the left/right buttons which opens a list of your pages, then select a desired page. Easy!

Quick Navigating between Report Pages in Power BI

Good news! This feature is also available in Power BI Service.