Friday, August 28, 2015

PowerBI is enhanced in the latest update


Not too long ago PowerBI got the GA status. You may want to read up on the following related stuff:

PowerBI and the Cloud
http://hodentek.blogspot.com/2015/08/doing-bi-in-cloud-using-powerbi-for.html

PowerBI on Gartner's Magic Quadrant
http://hodentek.blogspot.com/2015/07/qlik-is-in-gartners-bi-magic-quadrant.html

Report from SQL Anywhere 16 using Microsoft Power BI
http://hodentek.blogspot.com/2015/02/powerbi-preview-reporting-from-sql.html

Report from an EXCEL application
http://hodentek.blogspot.com/2015/02/powerbi-preview-reports-using-data-on.html

Rapid reporting with Microsoft Power BI
http://hodentek.blogspot.com/2015/02/spin-out-cutting-edge-report-with-power.html

Microsoft Intelligent System Services
http://hodentek.blogspot.com/2015/03/microsoft-azure-iot-services-update.html

Power BI Unchained
http://hodentek.blogspot.com/2015/02/power-bi-unchained.html

 A new update to PowerBI was announced recently and this is the latest update as of 8/20/2015.

These following are the advertised improvements:

  • Import Excel Power BI artifacts (Data Model, Queries, Power View) into a new Power BI Desktop file
  • HDInsight Spark connector
  • Azure SQL Data Warehouse connector
  • Support for Custom MDX/DAX queries when importing data from SSAS
  • Navigator dialog improvements: ◦Resizable Navigator dialog
  • Ability to multi-select items in Navigator (CTRL+Click, SHIFT+Click, etc.).
  • Query Editor improvements: ◦Query Group creation/deletion improvements (multi-select, etc.)
  • Ability to Split Query (i.e. refactor common base steps into a new query)
  • Query Icons to reflect type of query in Queries navigator pane
  • Data Modeling improvements: ◦Resizing of columns in Data View
  • Moving Measures from one table to another
  • Live Analysis Services Connections: Ability to change the database from Edit Queries dialog.
You can see there are plenty of things coming together and probably frequent updates keeps needed things in good focus. Since connectors are the next big thing, there are new connectors which should add to productivity.

You download the new PowerBI from the link mentioned earlier.


While using the previous PowerBI with ODATA I had experienced problems creating relationships and the auto-detect relationship feature was not working. Trying to create known relationship also produced the same errors and I believe they were related to something connected to the Analysis, or the model. I will revisit this problem and if you come back later you may find a related post.

Interestingly as soon as the error was generated Microsoft wanted to know about it and a sort of 'ticket' with all relevant information from my application was generated and mailed to Microsoft. I am sure it will be scrutinized.

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