BI-RoundUp – Power BI (Service Update April & May – Personal Gateway Update – How to Purchase Power BI Premium – Managing Power BI Premium – Memory Consumption in Power BI File – Power BI – Exposing M Code)
It has been a busy week with the start of another month leading into June, so here are the updates. I am pretty confident that with the Microsoft Data Insights Summit happening Monday & Tuesday of next week that the new version of Power BI Desktop, as well as some new features will be revealed then. And I cannot wait, I always look forward to the start of each and every month.
Power BI – Service Update April & May
Due to this update being for almost 2 months there have been quite a lot of updates in the service, which I will highlight the significant ones below.
Already announced and available in the Power BI Service, is now the ability to be able to view usage metrics for your dashboards and reports.
The biggest update is now the capability to be able to pass multiple URL parameters as a filter.
I know that this is something I have personally been asked in the past and will be very welcome.
Also there is now support for PostgreSQL, the Power BI SharePoint Web Part is available for All Users, the Data connectivity SDK, New Service Content Packs as well as Power BI Apps Public Preview.
You can find out all the details here: Power BI Service April and May Feature Summary
Power BI – Personal Gateway Update
There has been a new release for the Personal Gateway, which has now got the following new features.
- Delete a personal gateway from the Power BI Service
- Improved performance
- Configuration and service logs
The personal gateway appears to be moving towards a lot of the functionality that there currently is in the On-Premise Gateway, which is great because it will now mean that it is reliable, as well as having troubleshooting tools, which I feel is essential when there are issues, and can help quickly find the problem.
You can find the details here: On-premises data gateway (personal mode)
Power BI – How to purchase Power BI Premium
Even though Power BI Premium is not officially been released yet, there is already content out there in terms of how to go about purchasing Power BI Premium when it becomes available.
You can find all the related details here: How to purchase Power BI Premium
Power BI – Managing Power BI Premium
This is another blog post, where Adam Saxton explains and goes into details around how to manage Power BI Premium.
There is some great content and one of the things that I am looking forward to is the ability to be able to assign specific users to the Premium capacity. As well as even if you wanted to only assign specific App Workspaces to the Premium capacity. I think that this will also make it really flexible for different options within your organization.
You can read up about it here: Manage Power BI Premium
Power BI – Memory Consumption in your Power BI Desktop File
This is a fantastic blog post by Imke Feldmann where she shows how to leverage the internal DMV’s within Power BI Desktop to reveal the memory consumption of your Power BI Desktop File.
One thing to note is that I think you can only have one Power BI Desktop file open in order to get the DMV’s. This is because of how in her code, she goes and looks for the Port ID, and if you have more than one file open it will not be able to know which Port ID to use.
I have emailed Imke Feldmann to confirm that you should only have one Power BI Desktop file open at a time.
In her blog post she explains how to get this data, by downloading the Query Editor M code and then pasting it into a table (which you create by using Get Data, then Blank Query)
Her blog post details are here: Analyse your memory consumption in PowerBI
Power BI – Exposing M Code
This is another really interesting blog from Reza Rad, where he leverages off one of my existing blog posts (What makes up a Power BI Desktop PBIX File) and goes into more details around the DataMashup file.
I honestly did not know that it was also a ZIP file, so I learnt a great deal from this blog post, to understand how the DataMashup file works. But this will also enable me to be able to go and possibly use the M code from within the Query Editor into other Power BI Desktop files where I need an exact copy of the M Code.
You can find Reza’s blog post here: Exposing M Code and Query Metadata of Power BI (PBIX) File