Category: Power BI

Design your Data Model efficiently with Star Schema for Power BI – [Must Know]

Hi Folks,

This blog post isn’t about any use case, rather it just highlights the importance and benefits of designing your data model for your reporting requirements. Every Power BI Developer should consider this at first place.

When designing your Power BI Reports, Data Modelling is the first step whenever you want to work with the Power BI dashboards or reports which plays a very key role. Coming to Schemas, I can say there are two schemas namely Star Schema and Snow Flake Schema. This blog post mainly talks about Star Schema for your Power BI Report/Dashboard design.

With Star Schema, Power BI data models are optimized for performance and usability. While every consultant try to create stunning visuals, they also need to focus on their data model before spending time on their report design.

Star Schema revolves around 2 types of tables in general, they were Fact tables and Dimension tables(talks about the business entities).

Fact table is central table in star schema. Dimension table are the tables which were connected to Fact table using a one-to-many or many-to-one relationship. Generally, dimension tables contain a relatively small number of rows. Fact tables, on the other hand, can contain a very large number of rows and continue to grow over time. So now let’s see how a star schema looks like and taken from Adventure works sample.

Image shows an illustration of a star schema.

Main point to note here is Normalization and Denormalization capabilities which are two great concepts to understand how star schema can help increase the performance of your dataset.

Star schema requires normalized tables and SnowFlake Schema needs denormalized tables. The design fits well with star schema principles:

  • Dimension tables support filtering and grouping
  • Fact tables support summarization

You can visualize the relationship as per the below diagram…

These concepts include, I will brief about the below topics which were not widely popular yet must know for designing an efficient Power BI Dataset.

Last but not the least, I should say that following and designing your data model using Star Schema is a best practice suggested by Microsoft.

You can lookout for references if you want to see video which can be of great help for you to understand the star schema mainly for beginners…

References:

Star Schema Data Model in Power BI

What is star schema?

Hope this helps…

Cheers,

PMDY

5 Power BI Errors..you often encounter – Fixed

Hi Folks,

Here I would like to give some tips regarding Power BI Errors which will be encountered in everyday job of anyone who’s going to or work with Power BI Dashboards or understand any existing dashboards and integrate them with Model Driven Apps. You aren’t alone…so let’s gets started…

Error 1: Unable to open document

Fix:

You were not on the latest version of Power BI desktop with which it was authored. You can quickly check the version by navigating to Help –> About

You should see a update icon as below

Clicking on it will take you to the respective page having the latest update from where you can update it.

Error 2: Class not registered error

Fix:

This can happen when you were trying to open an existing dashboard which was created by you or shared by someone to you, might be because you have two versions of Power BI Desktop installed..in your machine..like shown below.i.e.

  1. Installed Power BI from Microsoft Store
  2. Installed Power BI from Microsoft Downloads

Make sure you choose the right one which you have used earlier to develop the Dashboard so that you won’t run into any issue.

Error 3: Workspace deleted

Fix:

This error can happen when you were trying to access any workspace while you were creating a Power BI Dashboard in Dynamics CE using an existing workspace, make sure you have a workspace and the logged in user have access to the Workspace.

Granting access to the workspace will fix the issue.

Error 4: One or more Cloud Datasources have been deleted

Fix:

Whenever you deploy any new Power BI report or dashboard to Power BI Service, you encounter this problem most of the times. Sometimes after making a change to a dataset or taking over ownership of a dataset, you might receive the following error:

1. Click the “Recreate cloud data sources” button.

2. Reenter credentials in the “Data Source Credentials” section for your data sources

Make sure dataset is connected to Gateway incase you have configured.

Error 5: There is no gateway to access the datasource

Fix:

The first thing to look at when you have a missing gateway is to make sure you created a data source for that gateway. Installing the On-Premises Data Gateway is not enough. That simply registers the gateway with the Power BI service and lists you as an admin for that gateway.

You then need to go into the Power BI service and create a data source for that gateway.

You can create a data source by doing the following.

  1. Select the gear icon within Power BI
  2. Select Manage Gateways.
  3. Select your gateway and then select Add Data Source.
  4. When you are done entering the information, select Add.

References:

Power BI Start up issues – MS Learn

One or more cloud datasources have been deleted

Restore and Recover Deleted Workspace

Hope my post helps someone who’s facing similar issues with their Power BI Dashboards…

Thank you for reading….

Cheers,

PMDY

DAX Studio – Great tool to debug your DAX Queries for Power BI Projects

Hi Folks,

In this digital era, every Power Platform individual want to make more with their data. So obviously there are gonna using Power BI to provide great insights with their data.

Coming to reporting, every one knows to create their visuals in Power BI Desktop and publish them to Power BI Service to view the Power BI Dashboards in Dataverse. This is common and known by everyone. But if you go a bit deeper and want to build some complex Power BI visuals, you were going to definitely use DAX(Data Analysis Expressions). If you were new to DAX, look at this tutorial to gain more information on how to write them.

Next step is when you were writing the DAX expressions, might be in Measures or Calculated functions(including calculated tables, calculated columns) you can’t just write them out at first shot and publish your reports. Definitely it takes time and effort to write them and make the look syntactically formatted so that every one can understand. So you may need to debug your DAX expressions before you actually use them in your reports. It’s when DAX Studio comes as savior which can be integrated with Power BI Desktop in few simple steps.

First step is to download DAX Studio and install it. As soon you are done, you should be able to see in external tools tab.

When you open any Power BI report, you can open them directly from DAX Studio.

You can then open your DAX queries in your DAX Studio and then run/debug your queries, view the performance statistics etc.

DAX Studio is an open source tool which every BI Developer can leverage to improve your productivity in their projects.

Reference:

Video Reference

Web reference

Hope this helps….

Cheers,

PMDY

Resources for Power BI Projects

Hi Folks,

I hope all you guys are preparing for the upcoming holiday season. In this post I would like to point out all the learning resources available for Power BI so that you can keep yourself up to date.

To say actually I have also been new to Power BI and have been learning since 3 weeks…here I would like to list down all the learning resources available in Power Platform.

  1. Microsoft Learn for Power BI
  2. Dashboard in a day from Microsoft
  3. Getting Started with Power BI Desktop
  4. 75 Learning Resources for Power BI
  5. Power BI by Enterprise DNA
  6. Microsoft Power BI Samples
  7. DAX Reference
  8. Introducing Power BI
Download

9. Guy in a cube You tube channel

10. Debug your custom visuals

11. Power BI Developer Learning Catalog from Microsoft

12.Dax Studio

You can always reach out to the Power BI community where experts can help you if you were struck with any of your Power BI Requirements. If you know any other valuable resources, please let me know in comments so that I can update this post. Till then keep rocking…

I hope this helps…

Cheers,

PMDY