M365 Twin Cities Fall 2023 Community Days Follow Up

This past Saturday I was able to attend, present, and get connected with the community at the M365 Twin Cities Fall 2023 Community Days event. I haven’t presented at this event since Nov 2011 so it has been a bit and the last time I presented at the event my laptop went into hibernation mode when I was going to do my demo and I couldn’t wake it up, it was an epic fail –> Twin Cities ScarePoint Saturday Follow Up.

This time around I didn’t have any demos, my laptop didn’t go into hibernation mode, and only had a few minor issues with my remote clicker and advancing slides, so I thought it went very well. Now my content wasn’t really any 100 level information for beginners just getting started, but it is stuff that I run into repeatedly with customers, so wanted to share:)

The session was “Power BI Gotchas – Dan’s Dirty Dozen” – In this session you will get some insights into the Power BI gotchas that I have seen over the years. I will highlight a dozen of what I would call “what not to do” or shall we say “dirty” items. I have had an opportunity over the years to work with some of the largest customers of Power BI in the world and you might be surprised what comes up sometimes;) We will cover items around data model development, DAX, and report design of the things to be aware of and go over how to avoid and fix these things when developing Power BI models and reports that I feel should be avoided. The dozen items that will be covered are just a glimpse into the report development “what not to do” items at least in my opinion, I am sure you have seen your fair share as well and would love to hear what others have come across or potentially done too:)

On Friday at the event I went to the speakers dinner and got to meet lots of new people. I know most people in the SQL and BI community, so the M365 group is a little unknown to me. Thanks for all of those that made me feel so welcome and great to meet new people in the community!

In the picture above I am towards the back on the right wearing a blue Microsoft shirt:) I also wore one of my old Microsoft MVP jackets to try and blend in a bit more;)

I got to caught up in the vent and talking with everyone that I forgot to take a selfie picture myself with the attendees of my session. I did get to get included in the speaker photo after the event (I had to stand on my tippy toes in the back row so I could be seen).

Really appreciate the great work the M365 Twin Cities team put into organizing the event and thanks to all of the sponsors, speakers, and volunteers for making this possible. Looking forward to attending and presenting again in the Spring if the team wants me back:)

Here is a link to the pdf version of my slides and I will work on doing a recording of this event to make it available and post a follow up when that is available, that will add more context around the content that I shared – M365TC2023_PowerBIGotchasDanEnglish.

Power BI using Service Principal with Synapse SQL Pool with Shareable Cloud Connection

This is a bit overdue and a follow up to a few other posts I have regarding using Service Principal authentication with Power BI reports Power BI using Service Principal with Synapse SQL Pool and Power BI using Service Principal with Synapse Data Explorer (Kusto) Pool.

With the other two posts I did last year I had to use the SQL Server ODBC driver to get that to work and the big downside to that is that you need to use a gateway with that. Well in this case we are going to take a look at the new Shareable Cloud Connections that were announced earlier this year Streamlining cloud connection management for datasets, paginated reports, and other artifacts | Microsoft Power BI Blog | Microsoft Power BI

In the previous articles I already shared how to create the Service Principal account, so really the only thing to show here is the new connection you can create in the Power BI (Microsoft Fabric) service. Here is a link to the documentation that will walk you through this as well Create and share cloud data sources in the Power BI service (Preview) – Power BI | Microsoft Learn.

So in the service you click on the Settings gear icon in the top right and select Manage connections and gateways. From there you will click on the +New button in the top left and then configure your Cloud connection like such and you will see under the authentication method you can choose Service Principal!

Once you upload your report that is using the similar connection all you need to do is modify the dataset (semantic model) settings and adjust the reference from the personal cloud connection to the shareable cloud connection that you created which is using the Service Principal like in the following screenshot.

Once that is done you can go back and view your report and everything is good to go!

And you can go ahead and do your refreshes just like you would normally:)

And no more ODBC driver and no more gateway!!!