Tag: PowerQuery

Business Intelligence - BI, DAX, Power BI, Power BI Desktop, Power BI Documenter, Power Query

What is Power BI Documenter

Power BI Documenter Logo (Small)

On Saturday, 9th June 2018, we announced the existence of Power BI Documenter. As the name resembles, Power BI Documenter is a tool to help individuals and businesses to document their Power BI Desktop models. Everyone who already have several Power BI Desktop reports probably realized that documenting the solutions is not as easy as how creating a report in Power BI Desktop is. The issue is more visible in larger organisations with several Power BI Developers who are busy enough with a big list of tasks that are assigned to them on a day to day basis. Therefore, there is no time left to take care of the documentation. Every IT expert knows how important is to have proper documentation. We at Data Vizioner decided to do something tangible about this issue. So we started the project several months ago with the vision of creating web app to help individuals and businesses to keep their Power BI documentation on track. In this post I’m not going to explain how you can easily start documenting your Power BI Desktop reports using Power BI Documenter. You can learn more about Power BI Documenter and how to use it here. Despite the fact that the current version of Power BI Documenter is the very first version of the app with lots of limitations, it indeed can help users with their Power BI documentation tasks. All you need to do is to export the Power BI Desktop files (PBIX) to Power BI Template format (PBIT) and upload it to Power BI Documenter web app. Continue reading “What is Power BI Documenter” →

Azure, Azure Analysis Services, BISM Tabular, Business Intelligence - BI, Data Warehousing - DW, DAX, Power BI, Power BI Desktop, Power Query, SQL Server, SQL Server Analysis Services - SSAS, T-SQL

Time Dimension in Power BI and SSAS Tabular Model Supporting Minutes Time Bands

2018-05-23 12_58_48-Symbols (Open in Visio).vsdx - Visio Professional

Date dimension has been discussed quite a lot on the Internet and you can find lots of valuable articles around it here and there. But what if you need to analyse your data in time level? A customer has a requirement to analyse their data in Minutes level. This means that the granularity of the fact table would be at minute level. So, if they store the data in their transactional database in seconds level, then we need to aggregate that data to minutes level. I don’t want to go there, just bear in mind that the granularity of your fact table is something that you must think about at the very first steps. In most cases, if not all cases, you’d be better to have a separate Time dimension. Then you need to have a TimeID or Time column in your fact table to be able to create a relationship between the Time dimension and the fact table. In this post I show you two ways to create Time dimension in Power BI:

  • Creating Time dimension with DAX
  • Creating Time dimension with Power Query (M)

Alternatively, you can take care of the Time dimension in the source system like SQL Server. Continue reading and you’ll find a T-SQL codes as complementary.

The techniques that I explain here can be done in SSAS Tabular model and Azure Analysis Services as well.

Requirements:

To follow the steps of building the test model you need to have:

  • Power BI Desktop: Download the latest version from here
  • A sample fact table containing time or datetime. I modified FactInternetSales from AdventureWorksDW and made it available for you to download in Excel format (find the download link at the bottom of the post)

Continue reading “Time Dimension in Power BI and SSAS Tabular Model Supporting Minutes Time Bands” →