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Author: Olivier Van Steenlandt

Tabular Model – Help – Can’t create a Calculation Group

Recipe Overview Preparation Time: 5 minutes Ingredients Problem Statement While I was writing another data recipe, I ran into an issue. For some reason, the “Create Calculation Group” was not visible / enabled in Tabular Editor. I tried to create a Calculation Group by right-clicking on the Table Folder –> Create but the option wasn’t available. I tried an alternative way: going to the Model Section in the Tabular Editor toolbar. But unfortunately, the option…

Tabular Model – Time Intelligence functions with an alternative Financial Year-ending in DAX

Recipe Overview Preparation time: 10 minutes Ingredients Problem Statement Many companies don’t follow the regular Calendar as we know (January 1st – December 31st). They follow their own Financial Calendar (often called Fiscal Calendar) which can start at any time of the year. Because of this, writing Year-To-Date calculations in DAX for your Tabular Model might seem challenging. In the step-by-step example, we are working for a company that starts its Financial Year on July…

First-time mentoring – New Stars of Data

No technical blog post this time. I want to stand still for a moment to something completely different. Last week, on Friday, October 27th, 2023 the New Stars of Data conference had its 7th run. If you are not familiar with New Stars of Data, this wonderful event is a conference organized by William Durkin and Ben Weissman. The conference’s goal is to give newcomer speakers a virtual stage to present for the very first…

Takeover a Personal Power BI Workspace

Since a couple of weeks, we launched shared Power BI Datasets for our end users. Which allows them to analyze data in an easier way. Depending on their requirements and preferences, they can easily start to analyze data in Excel or create a Power BI report in the Power BI service. After the end user completes their analysis, they save the newly created Power BI report in their Personal workspace for future reference. Or they…

Tabular Model – Help – SortByColumn property set to an invalid column ID

Problem statement Since a couple of weeks, we have been redesigning our SSAS Tabular Model. We are keeping the model as user-friendly as possible and we try to minimize overhead for our end-users to a bare minimum. During this process, we were configuring certain properties for every column in our model like Display Folder, Hidden, Summarize By, Display Ordinal, Available in MDX, Translations, Shown in Perspective… After making these changes, we pushed our changes into…

Tabular Model – Help – I can’t find my Dimensions in Excel

Problem statement A colleague reached out last week while connecting to one of our SQL Server Analysis Services models in Excel. He couldn’t find the expected Attribute folders in the model. He was looking for the following dimensions: So I started to investigate. As a first test, I connected to the same model in Excel and I was surprised that the “lost” dimensions were perfectly visible to me. On this particular SSAS Tabular Model, we…

Azure DevOps Pipelines – SQL Server Deploy – One to rule them all

In one of my previous blog posts, I used the SQL Server database deploy task to deploy my DACPAC to SQL Server. Unfortunately, this task became deprecated in Release Pipelines. In this blog post, I would like to share the alternative. Additionally, we will be moving from a Classic Release pipeline to a YAML pipeline. The YAML pipeline will be responsible for building and deploying our Database Projects. Quick Overview Why move to YAML? What…

Migrate Multiple SSRS Reports at once to Power BI Paginated Reports

A few weeks ago I released a blog post about migrating SSRS Reports to Power BI Paginated Reports. At that point in time, I wasn’t aware of any way to migrate multiple SSRS Reports in one go. Meanwhile, I have done some research and experimented a bit. In this blog post, I will be going through 2 different ways to migrate multiple SSRS Reports at once to Power BI. Quick Overview Reporting Portal —Migration —Validation…

Episode 012 – Finding (Data) Friends

No new technical blog post for now, I’m currently enjoying some time off where I’m working on new content. A brand new session and some new blog posts as well. I had the pleasure to join Jess Pomfret (LinkedIn, Twitter) and Ben Weissman (LinkedIn, Twitter) during an episode of Finding (Data) Friends. For the people that don’t know this podcast yet, every week, Jess and Ben are inviting a new person onto the podcast to…

Azure DevOps YAML Pipelines – Deploy to Azure SQL

In my previous blog post, we created an Azure DevOps YAML Pipeline to automate our Database Project Build process. In this blog post, we are going to create an Azure DevOps YAML Release Pipeline for Azure SQL. Quick Overview Prerequisites Step-by-step Example —Download Pipeline Artifact —Deploy Dacpac to Azure SQL —Adding the right trigger Considerations Prerequisites If you are just joining this blog post series and you want to follow the step-by-step examples, I advise…