Kyle A. Mueller

I don't usually write post on LinkedIn, but I'm very exited about the latest update in Power BI desktop, in particular, User-defined Functions. For me, this feature will make writing and debugging DAX so much easier, it has a lot of potential to make developer's speed to delivery a lot faster, creating a standardise library of functions (check out https://daxlib.org/ by SQLBI) and code snippets that can be leverage by all developers in an organisation. Taking this further, the ability to write DAX closer to a functional programming paradigm would make the AI coding agents even more efficient at generating complex semantic models. This is exiting! I did an initial test (see some tips below) and can't wait to test it a bit more. I found the video by SQLBI very helpful and highly recommend it to all Power BI devs. #PowerBI

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I was helping someone with a #PowerBI report yesterday. Some information seemed to be missing from the report. As we were walking through the troubleshooting process, it dawned on me that it's not Power BI as a reporting tool that's difficult...meaning the creation of a report, adding fields to visualizations, formatting the way it looks, etc. What's difficult is understanding how your modelling decisions affected what you see on the page, how the seemingly innocent little lines and arrows between your tables/objects can have a significant impact on the numbers you see (or don't), and how the default interactivity behavior between reporting objects could affect that as well. This is the part that AI will never be able to automate or help fix, the ability to understand what you're doing and how dependencies matter. In a few years the AI hype will be gone, and there's going to be ton of crappy models out there to fix... Take the time to learn the ins and outs of your trade, it'll always be worth it in the long run.

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I know a lot of the folks I'm connected with on here lean more toward #Tableau than #PowerBI and I thought they'd find this interesting. Most of us live in a silo where we aren't aware of the chatter in other spaces. Everything seems rosy on the other side of the fence. Did you know that totals on Matrix visuals (text tables) in Power BI essentially don't work? The totals are not a summation of the rows displayed in the table, it's pretty wild! It's been known for years and Microsoft has neglected to address it. At the bottom of this post is an example of some DAX I needed to get totals to display correctly (all the ISINSCOPE chunks are because of this totaling issue). Why do I bring this up? Not to bash Power BI, it's a great tool. I bring it up because people who only know Tableau like to gripe about any number of things (can't format multiple objects at once in a dashboard, etc.). However, every tool has these little annoyances and neither Tableau or Power BI is special in that regard. The grass isn't always greener on the other side! 😛 Here's what the code should've been if totals worked as expected: DIVIDE([Total Billable Hours],[Total Hours],0) And here's what was needed to get totals to work correctly: % Utilization =    VAR __Utilization =         DIVIDE(                 [Total Billable Hours],[Total Hours],0)     VAR __Days = COUNTROWS('Hours')     VAR __Result =         SWITCH( TRUE(),             ISINSCOPE(People[Name]) && ISBLANK( __Days),             BLANK(),             ISINSCOPE( People[Name]), __Utilization + 0,             //otherwise                 VAR __Table =                     SUMMARIZE(                         'People',                         People[Name],                         "__billedHours", [Total Billable Hours],                         "__totalHours", [Total Hours]                     )                 VAR __billHours = SUMX( __Table, [__billedHours])                 VAR __hours = SUMX( __Table, [__totalHours])             RETURN                 DIVIDE(__billHours,__hours)         ) RETURN     __Result

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13 Comments

Power BI development can get "messy"... Don't get me wrong it's an incredible tool & the industry leader. But if you've been using #PowerBI for 4-5-6 years, you've probably encountered a few things across your environment. 💡 Workspace Sprawl - your company's workspaces are filled with hundreds of PBI reports, some of them that haven't been used in YEARS! 💡 Model Performance - slow semantic models or just too many semantic models in general. Power BI thrives when their is a single source of truth with centralization & standards. 💡 Data Quality - disparate semantic models lead to issues with data quality and business stakeholders truly trusting the data. 💡 Security - with the sprawl of hundreds of reports across dozens of workspaces it's hard to keep your finger on proper security and permission for each report. 💡 Sluggish Adoption - when end users get frustrated they revert back to the path of least-resistance. In this case, that path leads users back to Excel. If any of these things sound familiar, check out this article to drive Power BI enablement & adoption. Or reach out to schedule a complimentary Data Strategy Session with our team of Certified Microsoft consultants. 📩 info@fultonanalytics.com https://lnkd.in/g39Wicm2

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As a business-side developer, I’ve appreciated watching BI evolve—from the freedom (and chaos) of ad-hoc analysis to the governance, modeling standards, and guardrails we rely on today. Kevin Arnold does an excellent job breaking down how to empower business developers without slowing them down, using governance tools and best practices as enablers rather than constraints. It’s a thoughtful, practical take on what modern BI maturity should actually look like. #PowerBI #SML #LearningTogether

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🧵 Hearing "GraphQL" for the first time years ago at a conference made me think I needed to dust off my old TI-85 and remember how to graph equations. Not really, but I did realize I was way in over my head. I was still early in my career as an Analyst learning SQL, and now there's this new Query Language? How do you use it? Why do we have it? What is the purpose and function? What does graphing have to do with any of it? Spoiler: nothing. The "graph" refers to graph theory. Now, I'm going back to basics to learn more about GraphQL: It's a query language for APIs that lets clients ask for the data they need, nothing more and nothing less. One endpoint, strongly typed, and self-documenting. Why dust this off now? - It's everywhere, with big tech companies running GraphQL in production - Microsoft Fabric now has native GraphQL support. You can spin up a fully typed API endpoint directly from your Lakehouse or Warehouse with zero code - It changes how you think about data modeling. Designing a schema forces clarity about relationships and what consumers actually need - It's strongly typed by default, which means better tooling, autocomplete, and catching errors before they reach production Looking forward to sharing what I learn, and hearing from others on this journey. #GraphQL #APIDevelopment #DataEngineering #MicrosoftFabric #LearningInPublic

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