In recent discussions with my customers about Microsoft Fabric, the questions pops up how to create an internal and fair charge-back mechanism. There are different possibilities, from user-based, item-based, or usage-based scenarios, which you can leverage. From my point of view, the usage-based model would be the fairest one. In such a scenario, creators of items are eager to optimize their workload to reduce the usage on a capacity and therefore save some cost. But how can you create such a charge-back report? Let me walk you through in a this blog post how to set the basics and in my next o ..read more

From time to time I got asked how Fabric admins can automatically get notified if a new Tenant Setting appear as they don’t wish to manually check the UI on a regular base. Even with the new “New” indicator, it’s still a manual process. Luckily, back in May 2023, we introduced a GetTenantSettings API which we can leverage to create an automated notification process! In this blog post I’ll show you how to leverage the different Microsoft Fabric components to get a Teams notification once a new Setting is available. Prerequisites Following things are needed for this solution: Microsoft Fabric C ..read more

It’s been a while since my last post as a lot is going on and I had the pleasure to realize some really interesting projects in the past. One of them was to use the Power BI REST API to download Power BI Paginated Reports as PDF locally to a PC. And this is exactly what I will walk you through in this blog post. Prerequisites To be able to export reports programmatically, there are some things needed: Power BI report (it works the same for Power BI or Paginated Reports) Power BI Capacity (either Premium, Embedded, or Fabric) Service Principal with sufficient permission Python skills Tool to w ..read more

Recently, I got a very interesting challenge from a customer of mine. In their use case, they have created a Power BI Report (and Dataset) in DirectQuery mode. On top, they have created a Paginated Report on the same Dataset, and integrated the pixel-perfect report through the out-of-the-box Paginated Report visual. Lastly, to improve performance, they used Dynamic M Parameters in Power BI to influence the query send back to Power BI. If you’re not familiar with this approach, Microsoft has a great documentation here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/connect-data/desktop-dynamic-m-qu ..read more

Note from PBI Guy: A few weeks ago I had the pleasure to meet Manel Omani, a colleague of mine, who presented a super interesting solution how she’s tracking Power BI Capacity overloaders via Power Automate and notify automatically the Dataset owner. I thought this has to be shared with the Power BI community and asked here to create a blog post about it. Luckily, she agreed and I’m happy to share the result here. As a Power BI Capacity administrator, have you ever experienced multiple slowdowns and noticed that too late ? This is a very common issue that capacity administrators face when ..read more

This blog post is a little bit special to me as the whole idea and text is not coming from myself but from my good friends Dirk Gubbels, Principal Consultant at Microsoft, and Gabi Münster, Fabric CAT/Senior Program Manager as well at Microsoft. They approached me asking if I would be willing to share the solution on my blog and how can I say no to such a request? Feeling even honored that they considered my blog for their idea, I’m happy to share their walk-through how to start a job after a Power BI Dataset has been refreshed. In some business cases, there may be a requirement to perform a ..read more

In my last post, I showed how you can connect to a REST API with Power BI by using a Service Principal. After that, I got quite a lot of comments and questions if it would be possible to also create a POST request with Power BI, not only a GET one. First, I thought it will not be possible as Power BI is a “read-only” tool, but I love challenges so I gave it a try. After a while, I found a way how to do so which I explain in this post! Prerequisites I’m going to use the PBIX file I created before to connect to the Power BI REST API. But instead of listening all workspaces, I’m going to execute ..read more

As you probably know the Power BI REST API is a very handy interface to extract information in an automatic way. I showed already in different posts how to use e.g. Python and Power Automate to achieve various things (see https://pbi-guy.com/tag/power-bi-rest-api/). But did you know you can also connect with Power BI to the REST API and get e.g. an overview of all your workspaces? And even better, you can use a Service Principal to do so. Let me walk you through and explain why a Service Principal is more handy in this case. Prerequisites To be able to connect to the Power BI REST API there ar ..read more

Working with large datasets I almost always get the question if an incremental refresh can be configured within Power BI and yes, this is possible as described here. Especially if you have a date or datetime column it makes sense to set up an incremental refresh to reduce your dataset refresh time. Once set up, Power BI will create automatically some partitions behind the scenes making sure the data is stored as configured. For example if you wish to have 5 years of archived data, each year will represent one partition. But what if you don’t have a date/datetime column or you wish to create yo ..read more

Working with Data Scientist I got quite often the question if Power BI is able to trigger a Python (or R) script to recalculate scenarios and show the result more or less immediately in Power BI again. On top it would be great to be able to pass parameters from Power BI to Python so an user can influence the script. As you guessed it right – because I’m writing this blog post – it is possible! But not purely with Power BI but rather in combination with other (Microsoft) services. First things first Before I deep dive into a solution, I want to make sure a common understanding of the issue is g ..read more