Another blog post based on recent client experiences. Last week, I visited a client where we had extensive discussions on data model optimization. As you might know, data modeling in Power BI is one of my favorite topics, so I had an excellent day. It's also not the first time that I blog about anything …
Continue reading The Hidden Impact of Keys in Your Power BI Data Model
Imagine, you have everything setup and well secured in your data lakehouse, or data warehouse if you will. Then a user starts consuming the data in Power BI and imports all data according to the security applied to that users' permissions. Once the data is imported, all data can easily be shared to others who …
Continue reading Simplifying Security Replication in Power BI: A Step-by-Step Guide
Discussions with clients regarding the performance of their data models in Power BI have been a frequent occurrence for me recently. The issues often involve failed refreshes, queries that run slowly, or models that do not meet the clients' expectations. In most cases, I begin by asking a standard set of questions before diving into …
Continue reading From Frustration to Optimization: A Journey through Power BI Data Model Design
The first post after my vacation. I was in doubt for a while whether I should write this one or not... given the preview state. Since one of the customers I work for asked me for advise today about Power BI Datamarts, I thought lets do it! They convinced me that it would be a …
Continue reading Power BI Datamarts, should I use it or not?
If you are a Power BI report developer, you might have experienced the case I'm describing in this post. You did your utmost best to setup a decent DT(A)P process, where you clearly separate development, test, acceptance and production stages from each other. But as you don't want to be the only one that has …
Continue reading How to add DTAP stage identifiers of to your Power BI report with Smart Narratives
Recently, I have had a challenge at a customer, where a central teams maintains many dataflows in Power BI, to store their only and single version of the truth. However, this central team maintained many different dataflows in a single workspace, but did not want to share the entire workspace with others. What now? How …
Continue reading Sharing individual Power BI dataflows, but how?
Basically for every data model, but in particular for large and enterprise-grade data models, it might be wishful to perform backups. Power BI Premium offers a way to perform backup and restore operations for Power BI datasets. This feature, coming from Azure Analysis Services, helps you to take a backup of your dataset logic as …
Continue reading Script and automate Power BI Backup operations
Back in 2020, I released the first version of the Power BI external tool to document your Power BI data model. Since then, I wrote a lot about this topic, such as why adding descriptions to everything is important and various releases of the model documenter. Users encountered various challenges with the initial release of …
How cool would it be to sketch your architecture designs for Power BI directly with the icons related to the product? It makes it a lot easier to handover the solution design to others who can then build the solution. Besides that, it also looks super fancy! I am happy to say that as off …
Back in 2019, Ton Swart and I wrote a blog post on Versioning and CI/CD for Power BI with Azure DevOps. Back then, there were not many options available for versioning and professionalizing your ALM story for Power BI. Till today, this blog post is still my most read blog on Data-Marc.com which makes us …
Continue reading Integrate Power BI Deployment Pipelines with Azure DevOps
Data - Marc 