It can sometimes be frustrating to work with slow data sources or complex Power Query queries in Power BI Desktop: you open the Power Query Editor, make some changes, click Close & Apply and then wait a loooong time for your data to refresh.
Category Archives: Data & Analysis
Five Mistakes To Avoid When Migrating To Power BI From Another BI Platform
Now that Power BI is so popular, it’s becoming more and more common for organisations to migrate their reports from other BI platforms to Power BI. And why not? You’ll be moving to a modern, industry-leading, cloud-native BI platform and probably saving a lot of money in licensing costs too. As a Microsoft employee I wholeheartedly encourage this (obviously!) but it’s not without its pitfalls.
Keep The Existing Data In Your Power BI Dataset And Add New Data To It Using Incremental Refresh
Power BI incremental refresh is a very powerful feature and now it’s available in Shared capacity (not just Premium) everyone can use it. It’s designed for scenarios where you have a data warehouse running on a relational database but with a little thought you can make it do all kinds of other interesting things; Miguel Escobar’s recent blog post on how to use incremental refresh for files in a folder is a great example of this.
Adding Semesters to a Calendar in Power BI
I have delivered Power BI training at a number of universities over the last 6 months, and a few of the participants asked me the same question. “What is the best way to add semesters to a calendar so that they can analyse student data by semester?“ There are various ways of solving this problem. In this article I want to share with you one way to solve it using DAX in Power BI. I will use AdventureWorks database for the demonstration.
Understanding The “The key didn’t match any rows in the table” Error In Power Query In Power BI Or Excel
One of the most common errors you’ll see when working with Power Query in Power BI or Excel is this:
Expression.Error: The key didn’t match any rows in the table
Analysing Dataset Refresh In Power BI Premium Using SQL Server Profiler
A few weeks ago I showed how XMLA Endpoints allow you to connect SQL Server Profiler to Power BI Premium. As well as looking at query execution times this also means you can see in more detail what happens when a dataset is refreshed, for example so you can find out exactly how long a refresh took, understand which tables inside the dataset contribute most to refresh times or which calculated columns or calculated tables take the longest to create.
Power BI, HTTP/2, Internet Explorer 11 And Older Versions Of Windows
A very quick performance tip: do you have users consuming Power BI reports with Internet Explorer 11 and an older Windows OS like Windows 8.1 or Windows 7? If so, their reports are likely to be slower because over the last few months some important performance optimisations were made in Power BI that rely on the HTTP/2 protocol, and while all modern browsers like Edge and Chrome have supported HTTP/2 for a long time now, Internet Explorer 11 only supports HTTP/2 on Windows 10.