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Power BI Insights: Partition configurations; Dynamic M parameters; DirectQuery

by MSDW Reporter
Editorial Team, MSDynamicsWorld.com

Power BI pros discuss partition configurations, Dynamics M parameters and DirectQuery.

Changing partition configurations

Gilbert Quevalliers, writing on Four Moo, examined how to change partition configurations for stored Power BI data. Users can actually reset configurations to be stored monthly, yearly, quarterly, or daily. When data is partitioned for one month, a query gets executed for each month, whereas a query will execute for an entire year if it is partitioned for a year. Currently, the default time out for queries to complete is five hours. Although that is a lot of time, issues can crop up if the dataset is very large.

To get going, Quevalliers adjusted Incremental Refresh. He right clicked on the table, configured a variety of settings, saved a PBIX file and uploaded it to Power BI Service. Once the dataset refreshes, users can validate that the Power BI report got all the data. He noted that when checking the dataset memory consumption, it should be virtually the same as in the previous configurations.

Dynamic M parameters in DAX queries

Chris Webb addressed dynamic M queries. He self describes as a big fan of the capabilities. Documentation is set to come out soon about how to use dynamic M queries in DAX queries. In the meantime, Webb opted to provide his own overview of syntax. Users can view this syntax for themselves by looking at the DAX queries generated by Power BI Desktop with Performance Analyzer.

After providing an example, he provided more explanation on setting dynamic M parameters explored how to enable multi-select.

Pulling SQL queries from a Power BI DirectQuery dataset

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