Aug 6, 2023 · A few months ago a new option was added to the Sql.Database and Sql.Databases functions in Power Query in Power BI and Excel which allows Power Query queries that combine data from different SQL Server databases to fold. Here’s a simple example showing how to use it. On my local PC I have SQL Server installed and the Adventure Works DW 2017 and Contoso Retail DW sample databases:

Dec 1, 2024 · For me the biggest new feature in the January 2025 release of Power BI Desktop is the new TMDL View; many other people like Marco are excited about it too. For more advanced Power BI developers (and honestly, I don’t think you need to be that advanced to get value out of it) it makes certain editing tasks for semantic models much simpler, and while I won’t be abandoning the main Power BI ...

Dec 30, 2024 · Every year on this date I write a post reflecting on the previous year but, as you've probably guessed from the title, this is a special year: it's twenty years since I started writing this blog. Twenty years ago today on the 30th of December 2004 I …

Aug 22, 2021 · You may have noticed that a new dataflows connector was announced in the August 2021 release of Power BI Desktop, and that it now supports query folding between a dataset and a dataflow – which you may be surprised to learn was not possible before. In this post I thought I’d take a look at how much of an improvement in performance this can make to dataset refresh performance.

Oct 13, 2024 · I concur with your thoughts. with advancements in genai models and power bi moving towards it (gpt4 to gpt4o) plus letting users to train how the copilot should answer from their semantic model (like that in AI skills), soon copilot in pbi will do a much much better job and the c-suite who wants answers in chatty format will …

May 7, 2023 · I was always wondering – isn’t Import Mode Direct Query by another name? The difference seemingly is the data source location: in “Direct Query” mode it is the (assumedly on-prem) data source that (hopefully) supports the amount of …

Jan 30, 2024 · One of the most popular questions on the forums I follow is “How can I learn Power BI and Fabric?”. There are a ton of great, free online resources out there – blogs, videos and so on – but the people answering this question often do not mention user groups and conferences. I think that’s a mistake because, at least for me, attending (and indeed speaking at) online and in …

Aug 30, 2020 · In a late addition to the series of posts that I started here a few months ago, I thought it would be useful to look at how to optimise the performance of a rare (but nonetheless useful) type of merge: the cross join.Cross joins are not available as a join kind in the Table.Join or Table.NestedJoin M functions but there are two ways of creating them in Power Query:

My name is Chris Webb, and I'm a specialist in Power BI, Analysis Services, MDX, Power Pivot, DAX, and Power Query. I've been blogging about Microsoft BI for over 10 years, and racked up over 1500 posts here! I also speak at a number of conferences including SQLBits, the PASS Summit, the PASS BA Conference,…

Apr 20, 2020 · 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…