I am using PowerBI Desktop September 2019 release and I have two tables :
Employee
Country
I want to establish Many to many relationship between the two tables but I can't find (it is not detected) :
When I want to desactivate Composite Model in the features, I can't find the Preview features in GLOBAL :
are you using the Power BI Desktop Report Server? as the preview features wouldnt be available in there
If you could show more information about your tables that would be helpful
I think in your case, you are deploying to a Power BI Report Server instead of to Powerbi Desktop.
Power BI Report Server does not support many to many relationships yet, that is currently only supported in the cloud environment.
You can know the difference by checking this article.
Related
Years ago I used a BI product called Hyperion Interactive Reporting. It allowed me to connect to a data source and create data models from which I would create reports. So far, sounds like Power BI right?
It also had the ability to connect to a metadata repository database. This database would contain data that mapped the actual, often cryptic, table and column names in the database to human-readable, business terms. For example a column that I saw in Hyperion as "Cost Center" may have been in the database as costCenter, work_order, or PROJECT-NUMBER. (It would also allow me to define the default join paths, but let's keep this question smaller.) This provided a way to make report development easier.
In Power BI, I see that I can manually rename columns, one-at-a-time. (And each time I touch something minor like this, Power BI takes several seconds to validate the entire file.) But I also see the need for many models that use the same data sources. So I may be defining the "Cost Center" column a few hundred times (a handful of reports per data set to answer a specific type of question, a few data sets that need Cost Center because the transformations in the model will be different for each type of question, several different combinations of data sources that include Cost Center, etc.)
Is there a way to connect Power BI to a metadata repository? Is there a way in Power BI to say, "Across all of my models/datasets, if I'm using the costCenter column from the Financial database, display Cost Center to the user"?
With about 20,000 columns in my data warehouse and 20,000 reports in my current reporting system, this could become a big deal if we intend to migrate to Power BI.
TLDR; There isn't an easy way to achieve this. What you have now is probably better than you could achieve without a ton of work. If you do try it, use SSAS instead of Power BI Desktop to author models.
Does Power BI have a metadata repository? No. There are tools that can get metadata from Power BI models, but you would have to manually build the metadata repository. If you want a centrally managed environment like this, I would highly recommend using SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) for on premise, or even better, Azure SSAS in the cloud. (Azure SSAS will get new features sooner than SSAS installed on premise.) While Power BI Desktop is a great self-service tool, I wouldn't author in it if I needed to control or report across the environment. There just aren't easy ways to corral all of the Power BI models in a report and it's a much more manual process. SSAS will need IT Support and is a higher cost and you will hit more issues than Power BI Desktop, but you will need it if you need central control. It's possible that more management controls will be added to the PowerBI.com service over time, but as of November 2021, you can't do this easily.
So what's the difference between Power BI Desktop and SSAS? The same Power BI engine in Power BI Desktop also exists in SSAS. When you start Power BI Desktop, it's actually starting a SSAS instance behind the scenes. Using SSAS directly just makes it easier for you to connect to the database behind the scenes and see all the models in the environment from one place, while Power BI Desktop doesn't let you peak behind the scenes and it only loads a single model at a time.
How do you get the metadata? It is an easy thing to get SSAS metadata using Power Query (or any SQL tool) to pull Direct Management View (DMV) data. DMVs are management tables that hold all of the metadata of the model, and you just use SQL commands to get the data. Search on "SSAS DMV" to learn more. I have a Excel file that uses Power Query to pull all the key DMV views for all our models in our servers. It makes it easy to do the kind of analysis as in your example.
For Power BI Desktop, you can connect to the hidden SSAS instance and do the same thing, but the report has to be open to do it, and there is no easy way to refresh the data--you pretty much just repeat the process each time. You will connect via localhost:port_number, and the port number is randomly created each time you start Power BI making it impossible to refresh the data pull. There are External Tools such as DAX Studio, Power BI Helper, and dataMarc's Document Model that make that easier, but there's no easy way to automate building the metadata repository for Power BI Desktop files. I would use SSAS directly rather than trying to automate building a large metadata repository.
What about making changes to models? To my knowledge, there aren't any tools that make it easy to make changes across models, though again, you could manually build them. I don't think I would trust my own tool to automate changes across models though. There's just too much that could go wrong. But if you had the need and the budget, you could build it. Look at tools like Tabular Editor, ALM Toolkit, and Microsoft's SSMS, and read on DevOps pipelines for automating updates. These tools work against SSAS and Power BI Desktop, but again, you have to open the Power BI files to work with those models, which makes automation that much harder to do.
Note that all the external tools I've mentioned except Tabular Editor v3 are free (though Tabular Editor v2 is free). PowerBI.tips is a great place to install all these tools from a single installer.
I'v been assigned the task to research Power BI Service platform to see if it is useful for the company I'm working at. I have a Power BI Pro license and basically my goal is to create several reports and dashboards from disparate data sources such as REST APIs, mongodb, SQL Server, csv and excel files.
I would like to create the mentioned datasets directly from the Power BI service website but I see that I only can create datasets from csv or excel files. And if I select SQL Server, it asks me to download Power BI Desktop client. The other type of data sources that I need are not even mentioned.
My question is if Power BI Desktop is required to develop and configure datasets for the Power BI service, because to begin with it is a windows only application.
Yes you are. The desktop version provides the full power of the software. You can learn a TON of things from this guy on YouTube and also from these guys in a cube. I'm willing to bet you can search the questions you have & can find specific example videos that'll help you determine if this software is right your company. In my opinion, when it comes to data visualization software, it's tough to beat Power BI. That's especially true if your company is on Office 365.
As a tip, it's important to note what kind of data sources you need to communicate with. And are those sources in a cloud or on premise. That's important depending on how "live" you want your data to be.
The main use of Power BI Desktop (Windows only application) is to get the data from the sources into data model, then load it to the service. The data connections and the ability to create reports is limited compared to the service. The main goal of the service is to share the reports and collaboration.
For example there is no realtionship designer in the service to connect the imported entities. You can create a report in the desktop and load it to the service, and then create other reports from its dataset in the service.
You can create dataflows in the service to get data from flat files, and databases, but you then use Desktop to connect to them and link them together there.
I am about to create an azure cloud business intelligence solution. Based on best practice, I will use Azure analysis services (AAS) to hold the data model and create Power BI reports who has live connection to AAS. This is the overall starting point. Then I have these challenges:
Challenge number 1: I want to be able to use the new features of Analysis Services as Calculation Group and Aggregation features. Right now I am using Visual Studio 2019 and SQL Server 2019 azure SQL database that contains a star data model. Can I create a data model in AAS that can take advantage of these new features and how can I do that? For example, can I use Visual Studio 2019 or do I need to create this in tools such as the Tabular Editor
Challenge number 2: If I have to make the model in the Tabular editor, how do I proceed and how do you integrate the model files into Azure Devops?
Challenge number 3: Is it possible to use the Power BI pro in the Power BI service to utilize these features?
All contributions and tips are received with thanks
Sincerely
All this is changing rather rapidly, at present.
Currently Calculation Groups are previewed in SSAS 2019, and have not been rolled out in either Azure Analysis Services or Power BI. Aggregations are available in preview in Power BI Premium, and aren't planned to ship in either SSAS 2019 or Azure Analysis Services.
Support for building Power BI Premium models in Visual Studio has also not shipped yet, as it's dependent on both XML/A endpoints and updated SSDT tooling. Currently you would use Power BI Desktop to design models using Aggregations. Later you can switch over ot using Visual Studio and SSDT when that tooling ships.
Does Microsoft POWER BI work in-house without relying on cloud technology? How is it done?
Here is one way: Download Power BI Desktop. Create .pbix documents. Share as you would an Excel workbook.
Use on-premises or external data sources that you have access to. For example, access a SQL Server database using Windows integrated security if so configured; or use the "page scraping" feature to pull a table off of a web page. The data is stored in the .pbix and can be manually refreshed.
This is obviously not a very sophisticated or well-managed approach but does have some advantages.
Following on from #Tom's answer, here's the roadmap including on-prem PowerBI that MS published last year.
https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/dataplatforminsider/2015/10/29/microsoft-business-intelligence-our-reporting-roadmap/
The short version is that there appears to be an intention of adding this to SSRS in a future release. But for now, the option we use is to share PowerBI workbooks using PowerBI desktop as #Tom describes.
Is it possible to load datasets created by the Power BI REST API as data sources in the Power BI Designer? Is this functionality planned? This would be useful for using Power BI Queries to combine data from other sources (e.g. older data in Azure DBs/tables) with the very latest data (e.g. for the current day, hour, etc) that has been loaded via the API.
Also, at the moment it is not possible to perform a selective delete (only Clear All Rows). Is this planned for the future?
Of course we are still in preview, but it seems some more features like this are needed to support production scenarios.
this is something we're considering but it's more of an idea stage at this point. Would you submit this request our support site? https://support.powerbi.com/forums/265200-power-bi
We use the support site to track feature requests to we can track requests and keep you updated when features you're interested in come online.
Thanks,
-Lukasz
http://dev.powerbi.com
http://blogs.msdn.com/powerbidev