by Chris Webb | Mar 10, 2024 | Chris Webb
Many Power BI connectors for relational databases, such as the SQL Server connector, have an advanced option to control whether relationship columns are returned or not. By default this option is on. Returning these relationship columns adds a small overhead to the...
by Chris Webb | Mar 3, 2024 | Chris Webb
If you’re tuning a DirectQuery semantic model in Power BI one of the most important things you need to measure is the total amount of time spent querying your data source(s). Now that the queries Power BI generates to get data from your source can be run in parallel...
by Chris Webb | Feb 25, 2024 | Chris Webb
Hybrid tables – tables which contain both Import mode and DirectQuery mode partitions to hold data from different time periods – have been around for a while. They are useful in cases where your historic data doesn’t change but your most recent data changes very...
by Chris Webb | Feb 18, 2024 | Chris Webb
The more you monitor something the more likely it is that you’ll see something strange you can’t explain. This is true of several customers I’ve spoken to recently who saw DAX queries run in the middle of the night by people who were definitely not online at the time...
by Chris Webb | Feb 11, 2024 | Chris Webb
There’s a new M function in Power Query in Power BI that allows you to read the data from a Parquet file: Parquet.Metadata. It’s not documented yet and it’s currently marked as “intended for internal use only” but I’ve been told I can blog about it. Here’s an example...
by Chris Webb | Feb 4, 2024 | Chris Webb
I don’t have anything against the use of calculated columns in Power BI semantic models in general but you do need to be careful using them with DirectQuery mode. In particular when you have a DirectQuery connection to another Power BI semantic model – also known as a...
