When you are dealing with technology, sometimes you need to accept the fact that there are certain limits — especially when it comes to resources available. And sometimes, maybe more often than not, business requests are such that it’s hard or almost impossible to implement within the current setup.

I’ve faced a quite challenging task recently — to migrate an SSAS Multidimensional solution to Power BI. The “issue” was that the client has a Pro license (which means, 1 GB model size limit), and there were approximately 200 million rows in the fact table (and constantly growing)!

I knew at…

One of the most anticipated Power BI features is finally there! No, it’s not new fancy Small multiples improvements, or another fresh AI thing…It’s not even DirectQuery support for Dataflows, neither dataset discoverability (which are both, by the way, very cool additions). Guess what — Paginated Report visual has just arrived into Power BI Desktop! At this moment, it’s still in preview, but the excitement around is huge.

I hear you, I hear you…Who needs this thing at all?! Why would one use the (almost) deprecated technology in super modern shiny Power BI solutions?! Even more, Paginated reports are almost…

The beginning of May was huge for me — my very first Pluralsight course was published!

A few months back (October last year), I became a Pluralsight Author. I was always admiring the quality that Pluralsight provides to learners, so I felt really honored to become one of the approved authors. I consider this a great achievement, as the audition process is quite demanding and highly selective.

However, I’ve had to wait for a few months until I got my hands on creating the first course. And, let me explain why…

Beginning this year, Microsoft’s announcement on the general availability of Read/Write XMLA endpoints, widely opened the door to many external tools intended to provide additional modeling capabilities supported by the Analysis Services engine, but not natively supported in Power BI Desktop.

Among many great tools, Tabular Editor, created by Daniel Otykier, is probably the most popular one, together with DAX Studio. By definition, TE is a lightweight editor for SSAS Tabular Models (so, it can be used also out of the Power BI scope), that enables you to build, maintain and manage Tabular Models. Up until recently, Tabular Editor was…

The only constant when it comes to technology (and this applies especially to Power BI) is — change! And, when I say a change in Power BI, I don’t mean exclusively on regular updates with tons of new features, coming every single month. Existing features are also being constantly improved and upgraded, so it can easily happen that something that was not supported a few months ago, or you had to perform different workarounds to find a solution, now works by default.

One of the cool new things that now work is the possibility to achieve query folding for the…

In my previous article, I’ve explained how you can display images and icons on the axis and in the slicers, leveraging a very simple technique using UNICHAR() DAX function. Now, I wish to expand on that, and show how you can create ratings visual using simple DAX! Let me be immodest and say — using this trick you can freely say that you create your own custom visual!

Setting the stage

As in my previous post, I’ll use a dataset related to support agent interactions with the customers — as a reminder, agents communicate with the customers via chats, emails, and phone calls…

If you follow my stories on a regular basis, you should have noticed that I’m often trying to enhance built-in visualizations provided by Power BI. In my opinion, there are certain scenarios when you, as a Power BI developer, can go above and beyond, and push your users’ experience to a new level, using simple tricks.

Not so long ago, I was working on creating a report solution for our customer support department. Basically, support agents perform four different types of interactions with the customers — chats, emails, phone calls, and surveys. …

“Will that break a query folding?” “Does your query fold?”… Maybe someone asked you those questions, but you were like: “Query…Whaaaat?!”

Or, maybe you’ve heard about query folding in Power BI, but didn’t know how to take advantage of it in real-life scenarios.

If you recognized yourself in (at least) one of the two situations specified above, then please continue reading this short series of blog posts!

• Part 1 — What is a Query folding in Power BI and why should I care?
• Part 2 — Query folding — Devil is in the detail!

I assume you are now familiar…