Power BI Weekly

Issue #80 - 13th October 2020

In the last week we've been reminded of the importance of having a diligent process in place when designing and building any tech solution, particularly when the solution involves working with sensitive data. If you're not aware of what I'm referring to, take a look at this article by the BBC here in the UK: Excel: Why using Microsoft's tool caused Covid-19 results to be lost, referring to Public Health England's defective solution for the Test and Trace programme designed to track down those that may have been in contact with someone who has later tested positive for COVID-19. Whilst Excel was the offending technology, it certainly can't be blamed - this issue should never have been encountered in the first place. My colleague James Broome has elaborated on all of this in his thought-provoking blog: The Public Health England Test and Trace Excel error could have been prevented by this one simple step. Do take a look at that.

Anyway, back to Power BI. The big news this week is the announcement of the improved MDX query performance in Power BI, whereby we now have the equivalent of DAX Fusion for MDX: MDX Fusion, which aims to reduce the number of Storage Engine queries to enhance performance. Great news for those of you using Excel to connect to and query your Power BI dataset. Elsewhere, Zainab Balogun has described How To Use Waterfall Charts In Power BI, and Alex J. Garcia has started a series about the "Power BI Centre of Excellence" concept, with the blog: Power BI Centre of Excellence, What and Why.