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 ...

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 ...

A few weeks ago I wrote about how Semantic Link Labs now has tools with interactive UIs and showed how you could use this to view lineage and so Vertipaq-Analyzer-stuff in a notebook. I didn’t show ...

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 case you haven’t already seen the blog post on the Power BI blog or the discussion on LinkedIn, we at Microsoft published a new white paper last week to help you decide which storage mode to use ...

Several years ago I wrote a very popular blog post about how to store images for your reports inside your Power BI semantic model. It solved the problem of how you could use display images (for ...

There’s so much going on in the Fabric community that it can be hard to keep up with it all. Semantic Link Labs is a great example: in the six months or so since I last had a proper look at it my ...

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 ...

If you have a DirectQuery fact table in Power BI you can use user-defined aggregations to improve query performance; querying a smaller, summarised copy of your data in an Import mode aggregation ...

This week, in the announcement about support for Fabric Pipelines in Workspace Monitoring, I noticed that it came with an Operations Agent that actively monitors and analyses Pipeline activity. And ...