Chris Webb's BI Blog

Some time ago I wrote a post about how you can use the DISCOVER_CALC_DEPENDENCY DMV to get a list of all the tables, columns and relationships referenced by a DAX query. That’s really useful an...

https://blog.crossjoin.co.uk/2024/10/20/finding-the-columns-touched-by-a-dax-query/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=finding-the-columns-touched-by-a-dax-query

I’m a big fan of Kurt Buhler‘s work (indeed we like him so much at Microsoft that we get him to help out with our docs) and I have a lot of respect for his opinion. A few weeks ago, in a thre...

https://blog.crossjoin.co.uk/2024/10/13/why-would-you-use-power-bi-copilot/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=why-would-you-use-power-bi-copilot

If you have been using Power BI Copilot to ask questions about the data in your model you will probably know that you should tune your Linguistic Schema to get the best results (something I’ve ...

https://blog.crossjoin.co.uk/2024/10/06/different-ways-to-create-synonyms-in-power-bi-copilot/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=different-ways-to-create-synonyms-in-power-bi-copilot

Did you know you can add the same physical table in OneLake multiple times to the same Direct Lake semantic model? Let’s say you have two tables in a Fabric Lakehouse. One is a fact table calle...

https://blog.crossjoin.co.uk/2024/09/29/role-playing-dimensions-in-fabric-directlake-semantic-models/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=role-playing-dimensions-in-fabric-directlake-semantic-models

On my LinkedIn feed this morning I saw an amazing demo from Brian Julius showing how you can use AI to generate code for Python visuals in Power BI, immediately followed by this video from Marco ...

https://blog.crossjoin.co.uk/2024/09/22/what-can-you-do-with-copilot-in-dax-query-view/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=what-can-you-do-with-copilot-in-dax-query-view

If you’re performance tuning a DirectQuery mode semantic model in Power BI, one of the first things you’ll want to do is look at the SQL that Power BI is generating. That’s easy if you have...

https://blog.crossjoin.co.uk/2024/09/15/another-way-to-get-the-sql-generated-by-power-bi-directquery-mode/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=another-way-to-get-the-sql-generated-by-power-bi-directquery-mode

I’ve been playing around with Power BI Copilot a lot recently, and following on from my recent posts on tuning Copilot by editing the Linguistic Schema and setting the Row Label and Key Column ...

https://blog.crossjoin.co.uk/2024/09/08/exploring-advanced-relationship-properties-in-power-bi-copilot/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=exploring-advanced-relationship-properties-in-power-bi-copilot

The logs for your on-premises data gateway contain a lot of information that is useful for troubleshooting and performance tuning. The contents of the logs are documented here and there a several...

https://blog.crossjoin.co.uk/2024/09/01/finding-power-bi-semantic-model-refresh-operations-in-gateway-logs/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=finding-power-bi-semantic-model-refresh-operations-in-gateway-logs

A few weeks ago I wrote a post on how to improve the results you get from Power BI Copilot by editing the Linguistic Schema. As I mentioned, though, there are in fact lots of different ways that ...

https://blog.crossjoin.co.uk/2024/08/25/tuning-power-bi-copilot-with-row-labels-and-key-columns/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=tuning-power-bi-copilot-with-row-labels-and-key-columns

As you probably know, in Power BI Direct Lake mode column data is only loaded into memory when it is needed by a query. I gave a few examples of this – and how to monitor it using DMVs – in t...

https://blog.crossjoin.co.uk/2024/08/18/which-columns-are-loaded-into-memory-when-in-power-bi-direct-lake-mode/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=which-columns-are-loaded-into-memory-when-in-power-bi-direct-lake-mode