Chris Webb BI

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Best Practices For Power BI On Databricks Webinar

Chris Webb BI

I recently took part in a webinar with Denny Lee, Liping Huang and Marius Panga from Databricks on the subject of best practices for using Power BI on Databricks. You can view the recording on LinkedIn here: [link] …or on YouTube here: My section at the beginning covering Power BI best practices for Import and DirectQuery doesn’t contain any new information – if you’ve been following the DirectQuery posts on this blog or read the DirectQuery guidance docs here and here th

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How Much Does Copilot Cost In Microsoft Fabric?

Chris Webb BI

There’s a lot of excitement about Copilot in Power BI and in Fabric as a whole. The number one question I’m asked about Copilot by customers is “How much does it cost?” and indeed there have been two posts on the Fabric blog here and here attempting to answer this question. The point I want to make in this post, though, is that it’s the wrong question to ask.

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Overhead Of Getting Relationship Columns In Power BI DirectQuery Mode

Chris Webb BI

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 time taken to open a connection to a data source and so, for Power BI DirectQuery semantic models, turning this option off can improve report performance slightly.

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Measuring The Total Time Spent Querying Sources In Power BI DirectQuery Mode

Chris Webb BI

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 it means you can’t just sum up the durations of the individual queries sent to get the end-to-end duration.

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dataCoverageDefinition: A New Optimisation For Hybrid Tables In Power BI

Chris Webb BI

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 frequently and you need to reflect those changes in your reports; you can also have “ reverse hybrid tables ” where the latest data is in Import mode but your historic data (which may not be queried often bu

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Query Caching In Power BI Premium

Chris Webb BI

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 and who were worried about the resulting load on their Premium capacities.

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Reading Parquet Metadata In Power Query In Power BI

Chris Webb BI

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 of how to use it: let Source = Parquet.Metadata(File.Contents("C:myfile.snappy.parquet")) in Source …and here’s an example of the output: This query shows how to expand the recor