I was recently looking on how to use SQL Profiler to connect to my Premium Per User (PPU) dataset so that I could see where the processing of my incremental partitions was.

When I first tried to connect using the default options, I got the error “Either the race with the ID of ‘AAA’ does not exist in the server of ID ‘BBB’, or the user does not have permissions to access the object”

This was rather a confusing error and it took me a little while to figure it out.

I did some looking around, or should I say googling and I did find a video by Guy in a Cube Measuring RLS Performance in Power BI – YouTube where Adam showed how to see the query performance using SQL Profiler, but I could not see how he successfully connected.

I also found a blog post from Chris Webb which is very similar to what I am about to show below, but this was to connect to Power BI Premium Capacity Connecting SQL Server Profiler To Power BI Premium

I thought I would show all the steps below on how to connect to Power BI Premium Per User (Which would also apply to Power BI Premium Capacity)

Before I connect using SQL Profiler, I needed to make sure I had done the following:

• Download and install the latest version of SQL Server Management Studio

  https://aka.ms/ssmsfullsetup

  • The reason for this is to ensure that I had the latest client libraries installed to connect to PPU
  • This installation also includes SQL Server Profiler
• Get the Workspace Connection as shown below
  • 
• And finally, I then had to get the dataset name I wanted to connect to.
  • In my example it will be called “exact Aggs – PPU”
  • 
  • NOTE: The dataset is also known as the database name

Now that I have got all the required information, I can now connect to my PPU dataset using SQL Profiler as shown below.

• I open SQL Server Profiler
  • 
• I then put in the Workspace Connection, and that I wanted to be authenticated using Azure Active Directory with MFA
  • 
• Now this is where the trick comes in, DO NOT CLICK ON CONNECT, I repeat DO NOT CLICK ON CONNECT
  
• I then click on Options
  • Where it says “Connect to database” click on the drop down as highlighted below
  • 
  • Then select <Browse server…>
  • 
  • When the window comes up for “Browse for Databases” click Yes, this is because it is going to connect and get a list of databases (or datasets for PPU) on the server.
  • 
  • I then had to authenticate and sign in
  • 
  • I then got the window “Brose Server for Database”, where I then selected my dataset name (Exact Aggs – PPU)
  • 
  • I then clicked Ok
  • I was then back at the SQL Server connection I could then see the database I had selected as shown below.
  • 
  • I then clicked on Connect
• Now that I had connected I then had to select the events I wanted to view.
  • I clicked on Events Selection and selected the following as shown below
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  • I then clicked on Run
• This then opened SQL Server Profiler
• Now, when my dataset was busy processing, I could see the progress as shown below, this allowed me to see which partition it was on to see how far it had processed.
• 

Summary

I hope that you have found this blog post useful and now know how to connect to your PPU or Premium Capacity with SQL Profiler and view what is going on within your dataset.

As always questions and comments are most welcome.

Thanks for reading!