• By Erik Hamoen
Use Activator for a real event-driven process
It’s been 2 years and a little since I wrote about Data Activator. Back then, it just got to public preview, and quite a few things have changed since...
Side Quests
In-depth technical articles and guides on AI & Data Engineering, Azure infrastructure, and automation.
• By Erik Hamoen
Parameters for your direct lake semantic model
Recently I started working with a semantic model that runs Direct Lake on OneLake. There is a separation of platform and semantic models in the worksp...
• By Erik Hamoen
Using semantic link (Labs) for repairing broken Power BI reports
Intro Semantic Link And Labs have existed for quite some time now in Fabric, but I never made time to start using it. But I’m trying to change that th...
• By Erik Hamoen
Using NFC tags for Power BI reports
Experimenting with Power BI has always been a lot of fun to do. Recently I tried the barcode scanner for Power BI Mobile, and a bit longer ago I tried...
• By Erik Hamoen
Use Row Level Security for a single Power BI report
One of my clients recently asked me: “I want to use Row level security RLS for this report”. The problem however is: It’s a very big model, used for o...
• By Erik Hamoen
Using the barcode scanner in Power BI mobile
You only know the things you heard about or read about. For me, that means I’ve been working with Power BI for 5,5 years now but never knew there was...
• By Erik Hamoen
The Purview hub and Admin monitoring inside Fabric
In my two previous posts, I wrote about the monitoring hub and the Onelake Data hub in Fabric. Today I’ll show you the Admin monitoring hub and the Pu...
Why Fabric Spark is the way to go
After attending the Fabric Community Conference last March 2024 in Vegas, I got even more excited about Fabric Spark 💚 Let’s explore why Fabric Spark...
• By Erik Hamoen
How to use the monitoring hub in Microsoft Fabric
In my last blog, I wrote about the One Lake data hub, a great place to find all the data you have access to or are allowed to request access to. In th...
• By Erik Hamoen
Experience the OneLake Data hub
In my previous blog I wrote about the impact analysis you can do when you use one dataset to serve multiple reports in multiple workspaces. But how do...
Merge Delta Lake tables with Azure Functions (delta-rs + polars)
Imagine a scenario where you want to create a delta table, but you don't have access to a spark cluster. Or maybe there are a lot of small frequent up...
• By Erik Hamoen
One model impact analysis
It’s common usage to create one or a few datasets semantic model for Power BI that can be used by many other report creators. But if you want to updat...
• By Erik Hamoen
Using the new Info functions to provide extra information for the consumers and creators
When the DAX Query View went to public preview in November, I think my second query was trying to get the DMV for the measures in my model. But at tha...
• By Erik Hamoen
Using Power BI's new Slicer and Reference labels
The new card visual Including reference label and the new slicer are some amazing additions to upgrade your Power BI reports. In this short blog, I’ll...
• By Erik Hamoen
Fabric’s Data Activator
With the public preview of Data Activator, we can now finally blog about this incredible new addition to Microsoft Fabric. In this blog post, I’ll tel...
• By Erik Hamoen
Using Power BI Metrics and the automatic forecast function
In 2021, Microsoft announced Power BI Goals, a new way of tracking your KPIs inside the Power BI service. We’re now two and a half years further and t...
• By Erik Hamoen
Give your Power BI end-users the help they need
When you’re building a Power BI report, you know all the possibilities that you’ve built in there, and during the demo for the end user, you’re happy...
• By Erik Hamoen
Creating a "Correlation Matrix" in Power BI
Recently I came across this question asked at the Power BI Fabric community, because I was looking for something like this myself. I had no idea what...
• By Erik Hamoen
Gain interaction within your Center of Excellence
Intro It’s almost five years since I started working with Power BI, but since that day, there aren’t many without it. And I love to share my knowledge...
• By Erik Hamoen
Controlling and visualizing the Fabric Admin Portal Settings
As described in the Adoption Roadmap, in the section on system oversight, it’s important to keep track of what’s happening inside your Power BI enviro...
Using Git integration with Power BI Desktop
With the June update of Power BI Desktop, a new preview feature arrived: the .pbip save option. This will create a Power BI project, just like how it...
Power BI and Git integration
With Build 2023, Microsoft presented Git integration for Power BI workspaces and later desktop, using pbip files and VS Code, but with workspaces in p...
• By Erik Hamoen
Automatically change your Power BI theme by the time of the day
Last year I wrote a blog about using a dark and light theme in one Power BI report. In this follow-up post, I’ll show you how can automatically change...
Monitor Synapse Notebooks from a Microsoft Teams Channel
Working with Spark Notebooks in Azure Synapse Spark can be challenging, especially when it comes to detecting errors in various types of for loops. Wh...
• By Erik Hamoen
Using Power BI Visuals inside your PowerPoint presentation
We like to make jokes about PowerPoint being the first product of the Power Platform, and the fact that it’s a great tool for beginners to create Powe...
• By Erik Hamoen
Show lineage between the tables on an Azure SQL DB and a Power BI Dataset
In my latest blog, I wrote about using the Apache Atlas API to get full lineage from source to Power BI dataset and report. A few days after that Micr...
Loading your Cosmos DB data into a Synapse Spark Notebook
What is, in my experience, the best way to get data from Azure Cosmos DB. In this blog, I will provide examples of how to set up a connection to Azure...
• By Erik Hamoen
Power BI & Microsoft Purview: Showing ‘full’ lineage from source to report
Intro Microsoft Purview started as Azure Purview is a Microsoft solution for data management, including a data catalog, data map including the assets,...
• By Erik Hamoen
Analyzing Teams data over a full year
Since 2021 you can analyze your Teams data in a generated Power BI report from Microsoft. It shows you the data from the last 90 days by default, but...
• By Erik Hamoen
Using Paginated Reports in Power BI
On November 14th, Microsoft announced that paginated reports will no longer be limited to premium workspaces, but that any modern workspace can store...
How to CI/CD Synapse Serverless SQL
A custom solution with Python and Pandas for an incremental deployment This year 2022/10/05 at @DataRelay in Birmingham, I presented my first session...
Adding external users to your Power BI workspace — Update
In one of my first blogs, I describe a method of how to add external people to your Power BI workspace. You can read that one here. Now there is a pro...
• By Erik Hamoen
Creating a dark and light theme for your Power BI report
Intro Since I started working in BI, I saw a lot of colleagues using dark mode options, whenever they could. And when Microsoft revamped the desktop a...
• By Erik Hamoen
Using the new Power BI — Data in space preview
With Data in space, Microsoft gives you the option to get an idea of what the future may look like. In an augmented reality experience, you can pin Po...
Use Power Apps to write into Azure SQL Database
For a while, I wanted to create this demo, for which I’ll be using Power Apps to insert data into an Azure SQL database and show the results in our re...
• By Erik Hamoen
Using the new Power BI Field Parameter to give your end-users more flexibility
Intro When I was working for a customer two years ago, they requested to use the data hierarchy Year, Month, Day in a graph in Power BI. No problem, I...
• By Erik Hamoen
Using a geofence in Power BI
One of the clients I work for, got a request which includes geofencing. A geofence is a virtual perimeter for a real-world geographic area. It needs a...
• By Erik Hamoen
Getting data from the previous row in your table visual in Power BI
The problem Sometimes you want to have information from “the previous row” in your table. The problem is, your measures don’t have row context, so it...
Azure SQL Access Token Authentication with Python and Azure PowerShell from Azure DevOps Pipelines
In case you need to access an Azure SQL Database from your DevOps deployment pipeline to execute some custom script on a database. If you need to use...
Azure YAML Pipelines Secure your Environments
Some tips on how to effectively secure your production environment In this post I just want to talk about approaches on setting 'Approvals and Checks'...
• By Erik Hamoen
Power BI Goals, a new way in tracking your KPI’s
Power BI has always been about making your data visible. By creating pie charts, line graphs, tables, and all other kinds of visuals, you can show org...
• By Erik Hamoen
Power BI buttons & bookmarks
When I started as a BI consultant, the only way to create page navigation in Power BI was by using bookmarks and my other main use for bookmarks was c...
• By Erik Hamoen
Power BI datasets and Object Level Security (OLS)
I once had a customer who had a large collection of data from different subsidiaries. These companies were only allowed to see their own, anonymized d...
• By Erik Hamoen
Showing Microsoft Forms results in Power BI
A few days ago, someone asked me to think of a solution to show the responses of a Microsoft Form in Power BI. During this project, I used Forms, Powe...
Automated Testing of Azure Data Factory Pipelines
Improve the quality of your solution from a DevOps perspective Put your feet up - Photo by Kewal on Unsplash Developing ETL or ELT solutions in smalle...
• By Erik Hamoen
Exporting all your Power BI reports at once
A few weeks ago one of my colleagues showed me a PowerShell script to export all Power BI reports from a Power BI Workspace. This could come in handy...
• By Arthur Steijn
Copy Outlook Calendar Events with Logic Apps or Power Automate
Automatically sync multiple Outlook Calendars to one 'main' Calendar Photo by Estée Janssens on Unsplash Working as a consultant sometimes means havin...
Adding external users to your Power BI Workspace
A question I often get is how companies can share Power BI reports with external users, and how they can participate in a workspace. In this story, I’...
• By Erik Hamoen
Sending alerts to notify your whole team
In my previous post, I explained how you could create variable thresholds in Power BI for your alerts. In this post, I will explain how you could noti...
Exploratory Data Analysis with Azure Synapse Analytics
Build a Power BI Report on Parquet files with the Serverless SQL Pool Azure Synapse Last week, 3th of December, Azure Synapse Analytics was announced...
• By Erik Hamoen
Variable thresholds for your Power BI alerts with a streaming dataset
Power BI Alerts are an interesting way to notify you when something is wrong. In this article, I will show you how to set up alerts with a variable th...
Track your Azure Analysis Services Processing Times per Table
With Kusto Queries and Diagnostic Logs Recently I have been working with Azure Analysis Services AAS quite a lot. The number of tables in our model wa...
How to automatically add your DevOps IP to Azure Analysis Services Firewall
Without adding the complete range of the datacentre Since October 2017 it is possible to configure a firewall on your Azure Analysis Services. It is r...