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The ultimate guide to date table relationships – understand relationships with a date column, an integer column and “mark as date table” in Power BI correctly

This post is also available in: Deutsch If you work in analytics or business intelligence, you are probably already familiar with a date dimension, since almost every analysis has a reference to a date. But although nearly every data model has a date table, there is quite some confusion about the details. Should I use the column from the type date for the relationship or better the date as integer? Which of both is faster? And do I have to mark my date dimension as date table? Why sometimes my functions work without marking it as date table and sometimes they don’t?For a long time, I didn’t understand completely myself many details until Alberto Ferrari explained the for me missing details at the PASS Community Summit in November 2022. In this article, I try to break down this complex topic into an easy guide, in order to understand the details of date table relationships. The problem and scenario for our demo Whenever you work with a date related data model, at one point you want to use some time intelligence functions. In DAX, time intelligence functions are easy to work with, but you need a proper date table. A […]

Check if a text contains a specific value in DAX

This post is also available in: Deutsch Did you ever need to check if a certain text contains a specific value? While this may seem like a small topic, it’s one that I have come across multiple times in my own work, and I’m sure many others have as well.In this short article, we’ll explore how to handle this situation using DAX. With just a few lines of code, you’ll be able to easily identify whether your text contains the desired value or not. Example for our article Maybe I’ve worked too much in the past with AdventureWorks, but let’s imagine we are selling bikes and we have a product table. Our small example looks like this: For this column we want to check now, if it contains the text “bike” or if it doesn’t. The only function you need is CONTAINSSTRING In this case, we could do an easy approach and add a calculated column to categorize into “bikes” and “accessory”. For that, we only want to check if the value contains the word “bike”. The solution is quite easy, as the function CONTAINSSTRING is checking if a certain text contains a specific string. For our case, the […]

How to block other people from overriding your dataset in Power BI (and why you might not want to do that)

This post is also available in: Deutsch When you publish a dataset on the Power BI service, anyone with the proper access to it can make changes to the data model. Most of the times, you want people to cooperate and work together. But there are some cases, where you don’t want to allow others to override your dataset for some reason. This article explains how you change that, so that others won’t be able to override your dataset anymore. Tenant setting to disable override by others Actually, it is quite easy to disable others from making changes, as there is an option in the Power BI tenant settings. You only have to activate the “Block republish and disable package refresh”-setting: From then on, only the owner of the dataset can make changes to a dataset. When another user wants to override the dataset with the publish button in Power BI, he will receive the following error message: XMLA possibilities exclusively for yourself Another point I want to mention is how the XMLA endpoints react with this setting. As the owner of the dataset, everything stays the same. If you are not the owner, you won’t get any access […]

wtFact-February is coming! Get ready for my 20 best short Power BI tips!

This post is also available in: Deutsch It’s almost February and in the next days I will start a small series on LinkedIn.On every weekday, I will share a small tip for the main Power BI areas. The 20 best tips in a short version on LinkedIn Many times when I see issues with Power BI, the answers are going back to the basics of Business Intelligence or to a few Power BI key concepts that have to be understood. Nowadays, we’re living in a fast pace environment, so I want to share my 20 best tips as short and condensed as possible.I will talk about the 4 main areas of Power BI: In each area I will post 5 tips, so we will have 20 posts and Power BI tips in general.You can find the Power BI tips by searching for the hashtag #wtfactfebruary on LinkedIn or by following me or WhatTheFact.bi on LinkedIn. […]

My experiences from my very first PASS data community summit 2022

A little more than 3 wees ago, I was at the PASS conference in Seattle. In this post I want to share my experiences from the 2022 PASS data community summit! […]