Plex Server Direct Connectivity Checklist
Plex Media Server can be a pain in the neck to get fully working with a direct connection between your clients, whether on your local network or remote, and your… Read more »
Power Platform Extranets with AAD B2B Users: Using LastPass to Publish with Power BI Desktop; Dataflow & XMLA Access; And More!
No More Copying/Pasting Passwords in Power BI Desktop Unlike Office Microsoft 365 desktop applications, Power BI Desktop doesn’t keep track of more than one account at a time, which is… Read more »
Row Level Security, Object Level Security, Data Masking: What Are the Business Use Cases?
In a previous entry I explained at length the various ways to secure data in business intelligence products. In this follow-up I want to elaborate on which method(s) to use… Read more »
Getting the Most Out of Your Synology Networked Attached Storage: Did You Know It Can Do That?
While the initial consumer-grade NASes sold during the late 2000s/early 2010s had fairly weak CPUs and little memory, newer models priced in the $200-$500 range from about 2019 forward are… Read more »
Data-Driven Heaven in Power BI Using Field Parameters, Bookmarks, CSS, and Expression-Based Formatting
This week it just happened that two of my consulting clients needed a date dimension table so I started revising my base Power Query template to make sure it was… Read more »
Creating Cross-Database SQL Views via Stored Procedure from Power BI – Wait What?
Recently I wrote about things you can’t do on the Power platform when querying an on-premises SQL database. Specifically, I wanted to recreate views in a database that gets wiped… Read more »
Non-Obvious Functional Behavior in Power BI Deployment Pipelines
I’ve been spending time lately trying to get a deployment pipeline to work for one of my clients and ran into a couple of non-intuitive limitations that I didn’t expect,… Read more »
Limitations of On Premises SQL Sources with the Microsoft Power Platform
On the surface it may look like Microsoft’s data gateway provides an even playing field between IaaS and PaaS approaches with regards to SQL hosting, i.e. you can run your… Read more »
How to Get DAX Query Results Out of Power BI… Without Writing Any DAX or Code
Power BI’s DAX language is often described as “simple but not easy.” While visuals such as tables and matrices generate a lot of DAX behind the scenes, such as subtotals… Read more »
Connecting to Power BI Datamart and PowerApps Dataverse’s SQL Server from Desktop Tools and External Services
The main appeal of Power BI’s new Datamart capability is possibly the fact it’s including a SQL Server instance that’s optimized for analytical purposes and is fully managed yet still… Read more »