So, to test it myself, I added a full-text index to a column containing street names (so therefore fairly short strings) in a semantic model containing data from my favourite public data source, the ...

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 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 ...

So far in this series (see part 1, part 2 and part 3) I’ve looked at how you can create a Power Automate custom connector that uses the Power BI Enhanced Refresh API to kick off a dataset refresh.

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

When you ask Power BI Copilot a data question, the first thing it will do is try to answer that question using information from report visuals; if it can’t find the answer on a report page it will ...