(Livestream Replay) Optimizing Your Report with the Report Analyzer Tool! - with Michael Kovalsky

ABSTRACT 📝

In this livestream, we will explore the Report Analyzer tool, an open-source external tool for analyzing and improving Power BI reports. This tool is designed to help Power BI developers/admins match Visual IDs from Log Analytics to specific visuals in their Power BI report. Additionally, Report Analyzer provides a visual interface for prioritizing performance troubleshooting. Learn how to fully take advantage of this tool in order to effectively design performant Power BI reports.

GUEST BIO- Michael Kovalsky 👤

As a member of the Power BI Customer Advisory Team (CAT) at Microsoft, Michael advises top enterprise customers with regard to data modeling, DAX optimization, performance optimization, best practices, and optimizing development processes. His experience in Power BI stems from years developing highly sophisticated tabular models for Microsoft's internal reporting - taking Power BI to the max. Michael has also created a plethora of tools and scripts for the community (which are available on his GitHub page) with the goal of empowering Power BI users with more advanced capabilities.

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Michael's Blog
Michael's GitHub
Michael's Report Analyzer
Michael's LinkedIn

Calling the Power BI REST API with VS Code - with Mathias Thierbach

This talk introduces Visual Studio Code as a simple and convenient tool to access the Power BI REST APIs. Using the free "REST Client" extension, all aspects of the API can be used from within Visual Studio Code: Invocations can be saved for reuse, variables are supported, and API responses are available in full.

You will also learn about the different authentication types (service principal, interactive, admin), how those differ, and how they're configured.

All examples used in the recording and further notes are available here.

Note that this approach is also substantially faster then the "Try It" button integrated into Microsoft's official API docs here.

GUEST BIO 👤

In 2015, after having spent over ten years as a Software Developer and Architect with Microsoft technologies, Mathias Thierbach moved into the Microsoft BI space. He soon landed on Power BI, but also realized quickly that the development and engineering tools and practices were nothing like the ones well established in software development. This is how pbi-tools started as a project, filling this gap in tooling. Today, leading a growing data management team at YouGov, he experiences the benefits of those efforts every day. Having open sourced the project in fall of 2021, Mathias spends a lot of his free time bringing those practices to the wider Power BI community now.

RELATED CONTENT 🔗

Microsoft API Docs
Mathias’s API VS Code Samples
Mathia’s Notes/Articles
Mathias's Twitter
Mathias's LinkedIn
Mathias's GitHub

(Livestream Replay) Tabular Editor C# Scripts & Calculation Groups - with Bernat Agulló

Join Bernat Agulló and I as he shows you how to level up your skills in Tabular Editor! He'll spend time showing you how to use C# scripts and macros to create calculation groups, diagnose and optimize your model, and much more! Plus learn how to leverage Visual Studio to create and tune the C# scripts.

GUEST BIO 👤

Partner and Senior BI Developer at Esbrina, a BI consulting company based in Barcelona. Passionate about Power BI in general, DAX and Calculation groups in particular. I love automating things, first it was VBA and Excel, now is Tabular Editor c# scripts and Power BI I have spoken in several events and user groups around the world about calculation groups.

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Bernat’s Twitter
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PBI-Tools Setup and Configuration to GitHub & Azure DevOps- with Mathias Thierbach

This tutorial describes the setup of a simple automated deployment pipeline for Power BI reports using PBI Tools. It assumes that reports have a live connection to a Power BI dataset and that the PBIX files containing the reports are held in a git repository in either Azure DevOps or GitHub.

The first part of the tutorial explains the setup necessary in the Power BI tenant. Since a service principal is going to be used for the deployment, the necessary steps to get this set up are covered. Furthermore, the configuration of the pbi-tools deployment manifest is explained, and the deployment is tested locally.

With the basic setup completed, and the deployed tested locally, this second part of the tutorial moves the setup into a GitHub repository. A GitHub Actions workflow is created, secrets are set, and the pipeline is tested end-to-end.

The final part of the tutorial repeates the steps from Part 2, but this time in Azure DevOps. There are a few additonal settings required here, which the video explains. The repository created in the tutorial is publicly available here.

GUEST BIO 👤

In 2015, after having spent over ten years as a Software Developer and Architect with Microsoft technologies, Mathias Thierbach moved into the Microsoft BI space. He soon landed on Power BI, but also realized quickly that the development and engineering tools and practices were nothing like the ones well established in software development. This is how pbi-tools started as a project, filling this gap in tooling. Today, leading a growing data management team at YouGov, he experiences the benefits of those efforts every day. Having open sourced the project in fall of 2021, Mathias spends a lot of his free time bringing those practices to the wider Power BI community now.

RELATED CONTENT 🔗

PBI Tools
PBI Tools - Azure
PBI Tools - GitHub
Mathias Notes/Articles
Mathias's Twitter
Mathias's LinkedIn
Mathias's GitHub