Author: James Fancke

Converting from UTC to Local Timezone in Power BI and Azure Analysis Services

This post is a quick response / supplement to Kasper’s post “Show the refresh date\time in a Power BI report and dashboard“.

Currently there is a small issue when using the DateTime.LocalNow() (and other similar functions) within the Power BI Service or Azure Analysis Services when processing a refresh of data.

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How to automate (Azure) Analysis Services processing from a remote PC

There are many blog posts showing how to automate processing of a SQL Server Analysis Services model using either the SQL server agent or SSIS.

There are also many posts out there showing different ways of processing an Azure Analysis Services database through the use of Azure Functions, automation accounts, and runbooks. (SQLDusty.com, technet, Azure blog, official AAS docs, byobi.com)

Both of the above require some level of server administration privileges or Azure resource deployment.

What if you don’t have server admin rights or can’t create Azure resources?

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The increasing security requirements of a growing data model

In my previous post about why I think AAS is a great value proposition, I mentioned that AAS currently has Object Level Security, whereas Power BI Premium does not.

I’d like to now expand on this point by explaining why security is an essential part of a growing data model, and why Object Level Security is an important requirement of “larger” data models. (Note: large as in many dimensions and fact tables regardless of the row count)

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Why Azure Analysis Services is a great value proposition

Update: after waking up this morning I realized there was just one more item I wanted to add, the suitability of AAS for multi-geo environments, which for many can be a deal breaker.

Update 2 (18/12/2018): Daniel Otykier has reminded me of a further important distinction between Power BI Premium and Analysis Services, and that is the ability to use third party tools such as Tabular Editor.

After reading Matthew Roche’s blog post on Choosing Between Power BI Premium and Azure Analysis Services I couldn’t help but feel that Azure Analysis Services (AAS) was coming off second best in a two-person race.

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