Tabular Editor

Dynamic measure selectors For certain kinds of reports, it sometimes makes sense to be able to select which measures should be displayed by checking off members on a dimension, rather than including individual measures from the field list. There are many blogs and articles online that describe this pattern in... Read More

Multilingual Datasets A little known fact about the Power BI service, is that metadata translations actually work just fine for an imported or DirectQuery dataset within a dedicated capacity workspace (Power BI Premium or A SKUs). You can add metadata translations to a dataset in Premium in two ways: Either... Read More

This is part 5 of the Analysis Services DevOps blog series. Go to part 4 Release Pipelines In the previous chapter, we saw how to set up a complete build pipeline, that loads our Tabular model from source control, performs a schema check, runs the Best Practice Analyzer and even... Read More

This article provides a step-by-step instruction on how to enable Service Principal (SP) access to a Power BI workspace in dedicated capacity (Power BI Premium or embedded/A sku). In the following, I will try to highlight the minimal number of steps necessary to enable Service Principal authentication. You can find... Read More

Exporting Translations Tabular Editor lets you export translations into the same .json file format used by Visual Studio and SSAS Tabular Translator. This is useful if you want to delegate the task of translating your model to someone without access to your tabular model metadata. Let’s say you’ve added a... Read More

This is part 4 of the Analysis Services DevOps blog series. Go to part 3 Refining the build pipeline In the last chapter, we saw how to set up the first basic build pipeline, which used Tabular Editor to deploy a model from a .bim file or folder structure unto... Read More

This is part 3 of the Analysis Services DevOps blog series. Go to part 2 Automation Magic with Azure Pipelines Azure Pipelines is the service within Azure DevOps, that lets us automate our builds and deployments. In short, there are two kinds of pipelines in Azure DevOps: Build Pipelines, which... Read More

Converting partitions from M to Legacy When building Analysis Services tabular models on top of a Data Warehouse or Data Mart on a relational database, I recommend using the Legacy (Provider) data sources instead of the Power Query data sources available since SQL Server 2017. Unfortunately, Power Query data sources... Read More

This is part 2 of the Analysis Services DevOps blog series. Go to part 1 Branching strategy and workflow The first thing we need to align before getting started, is what branching strategy to use. While this sounds boring, it’s actually quite important, because it will dictate what the daily... Read More

If you’re refreshing different parts of your Tabular Model at different times of the day, you may need to know what the current refresh state is, across all objects of the model. For example, running a “dataOnly” refresh on a table, does not automatically refresh calculated columns, hierarchies or relationships.... Read More

Update May 29th 2019: It turns out that the technique outlined here can be used for SSAS or Azure Analysis Services Tabular models of Compatibility Level 1400+. In fact, just by adding the ParameterMetadata Extended Property (step 9 below) to any numeric column in your model, you can instruct Power... Read More

This is part 1 of a blog series on Analysis Services DevOps using Tabular Editor. Preface Almost 10 years ago, now Microsoft Regional Director and MVP, Troy Hunt wrote a groundbreaking blog series titled “You’re deploying it wrong!”, that brought the concepts of continuous integration and continuous delivery to an... Read More

Tabular Editor is growing. It’s time to start blogging. Some background history It all started back in August 2016, when I was challenged with maintaining a large Tabular Model with more than 50 tables, and over 800 measures. One day, my client asked me to update the display folder structure... Read More