As a follow-on from last week’s post about the new ApproximateDistinctCount function in DAX, I want to share something I found out from my recent testing for this function: ApproximateDistinctCount is ...

Market basket analysis is a fairly well understood problem for SSAS – it’s best handled using many-to-many relationships, as shown in the excellent The Many-to-Many Revolution white paper. However the ...

When DirectQuery mode for Power BI was announced I assumed it was just the next version of SSAS Tabular DirectQuery mode with the same extra features that we’ll get in SSAS 2016 (such as better SQL ...

One problem that can really drive you crazy when working with data from text files is the many different formats that dates and numbers can be stored in around the world. For example, take a look at ...

As you’ve probably seen in the blog post for the September 2026 release of Power BI, Import mode and Direct Lake mode semantic models now support the ApproximateDistinctCount() DAX function. I tested ...

Several years ago I wrote a very popular blog post about how to store images for your reports inside your Power BI semantic model. It solved the problem of how you could use display images (for ...

One of the most common errors you’ll see when working with Power Query in Power BI or Excel is this: It can occur with almost any data source and in a wide variety of different circumstances, and for ...

There’s so much going on in the Fabric community that it can be hard to keep up with it all. Semantic Link Labs is a great example: in the six months or so since I last had a proper look at it my ...

A few weeks ago I wrote about how Semantic Link Labs now has tools with interactive UIs and showed how you could use this to view lineage and so Vertipaq-Analyzer-stuff in a notebook. I didn’t show ...

Here’s a situation I’ve found myself in many times. You’re called to help someone whose Power BI report is suddenly very slow. You ask whether any changes were made to the semantic model around the ...

In last week’s post I mentioned that while Power BI reports (unlike Excel PivotTables) do not support the Detail Rows Expression feature, it is possible to partially work around this limitation by ...

There are a lot of articles and blog posts out there on how to handle OAuth2 authentication when connecting to REST APIs from Power Query in Power BI. However there is also a lot of confusion and ...