So, to test it myself, I added a full-text index to a column containing street names (so therefore fairly short strings) in a semantic model containing data from my favourite public data source, the ...

As a follow-on from last week’s post about the new ApproximateDistinctCount function in DAX, I want to share something I found out from my recent testing for this function: ApproximateDistinctCount is ...

Market basket analysis is a fairly well understood problem for SSAS – it’s best handled using many-to-many relationships, as shown in the excellent The Many-to-Many Revolution white paper. However the ...

When DirectQuery mode for Power BI was announced I assumed it was just the next version of SSAS Tabular DirectQuery mode with the same extra features that we’ll get in SSAS 2016 (such as better SQL ...

One of the most common errors you’ll see when working with Power Query in Power BI or Excel is this: It can occur with almost any data source and in a wide variety of different circumstances, and for ...

Here’s a situation I’ve found myself in many times. You’re called to help someone whose Power BI report is suddenly very slow. You ask whether any changes were made to the semantic model around the ...

There’s so much going on in the Fabric community that it can be hard to keep up with it all. Semantic Link Labs is a great example: in the six months or so since I last had a proper look at it my ...

Several years ago I wrote a very popular blog post about how to store images for your reports inside your Power BI semantic model. It solved the problem of how you could use display images (for ...

In my recent post on web services in Power Query I mentioned that while the Power Query Web.Contents() function generates a GET request by default, you can make it generate a POST request by ...

So far in this series (see part 1, part 2 and part 3) I’ve looked at how you can create a Power Automate custom connector that uses the Power BI Enhanced Refresh API to kick off a dataset refresh.

When using the Web.Contents function to call a web service in Power Query in either Power BI or Excel you may encounter the following error: DataFormat.Error: Block length does not match with its ...

In the blog post for the October 2022 release of Power BI Desktop there’s a brief description of a new optimisation in Power BI for filters that perform searches in text columns. In this blog post I’m ...