Absence in a Rolling 10 Week Window

From September 2024, schools will need to be able to track the number of sessions (half days) of unauthorized absence in a rolling period of 10 school weeks. This period of 10 weeks can span holidays and academic years. The Department for Education is coming at this from the perspective of a threshold measure for […]

Education Data Modelling

A look at modelling data for Power BI in an education setting.

FABRIC GIT, Migration to TMDL

As an organisation we have a set of central semantic models that everything runs off. These are checked into GIT and we operate a branching model. Now that TMDL is more fully supported I’ve looked at migrating over to using it. Do be aware that it is not yet GA so this more of an […]

Fabric Python Helper Functions

Since Fabric went GA I’ve moved the small amount of stuff that we had running in Azure Synapse into Fabric notebooks. (Sadly a large amount of our data estate is still sat on prem with SSIS… small steps!). In the process, I’ve needed to build python functions to get attachments from outlook as well as […]

API Auth in Fabric Notebooks

I’ve been experimenting with the functionality of Microsoft Fabric and wanted to share a few things I’m using in Notebooks that help manage the wider Power BI estate. The first step to doing that thought is being able to securely authenticate against Microsoft APIs.

Week on Week Comparisons

Working for a multi academy trust I was asked to provide comparison of a range of measures (attendance and suspensions) by week with the same week the previous year. On the face of it this sounds simple until you realise that each academy has slightly different term dates and within that use inset days differently […]

Low Code Power BI Rest API Logs (Synapse)

Introduction A key requirement for strong Power BI governance is being able to easily report on usage from logs. There are many ways of getting logs in Power BI and many blogs looking at the various options. My preference until recently was to use the Rest API via Powershell to download a log file each […]

Field Parameters in Tabular Editor

UPDATED WITH EXTRA REQUIRED STEPS The May 2022 release of Power BI brought an exciting feature that greatly enables self service BI. I’d highly recommend watching Wyn Hopkins: Field Parameters in Power BI giving a brief introduction. My organisations main models however are deployed straight from Tabular Editor via the XMLA end point. Therefore to […]

Calculation Groups and RLS

I had a specific requirement to be able to show summary data for a whole organisation ignoring any RLS while being able to slice by all attributes. At the same time I needed to only show data attributed to names, for particular groups defined by RLS. There are many approaches to doing this. One I’d […]

Data Model Vs DAX

In this post we look at how leveraging the data model correctly can simplify our DAX and increases report speed. Using a dataset with 10,000,000 rows we will use Power Query to make a change that reduces the render time for a visual from 15.6 seconds to 1.6 seconds. A classic requirement is one of […]