Power BI Weekly

Issue #171 - 23rd August 2022

In the last week we've been told about the way Power BI is paving the way for smooth Azure Analysis Services migrations, which is an abstract title for the announcement that you can now assign "write" permissions on individual datasets. This will allow operations like dataset metadata updates to be performed by an identity without having to assign that identity a workspace-level role, amongst other actions. This announcement has also made me realize that there are now non-admin APIs to manage User Permissions to datasets. They must have landed towards the end of last year, since the corresponding docs (Datasets Permissions) were created in January this year. But, despite curating this newsletter (which I like to think captures most of what goes on in the Power BI ecosystem), I haven't seen these new APIs announced anywhere! Anyway, I'm glad I've noticed them now, as the lack of programmatic management of dataset user access has been a major pain point over the last few years. Maybe this will be news to some of you readers as well. Oh - and one final thing regardings the REST APIs: the "Try It" tool is back! Go ahead and test the Groups - Get Groups API to see for yourself.

The other content I wanted to highlight this week are the (rare) articles by Jeffrey Wang (founder of DAX), who has written about the amazingly useful new DAX EVALUATEANDLOG Function (currently not officially supported - so use with care), which helps see intermediate outputs in your DAX expressions. Jeffrey has also created a simple GUI to visualize the outputs of this new function, which you can find referenced in the blog. And the follow-up blog has already landed: Understand the Output of EVALUATEANDLOG Function of Scalar Expressions. These are some great strides to improve the development experience of DAX expressions, bringing it closer and closer to making Power BI Desktop an engineer's tool in its own right (of course complemented by external tools such as Tabular Editor and DAX Studio!). Thanks to Brian Julius' LinkedIn post for bringing it to my attention.