Analytics Engineering with Microsoft Fabric and Power BI

Appendix. Going Above and Beyond with External Tools

A Note for Early Release Readers

With Early Release ebooks, you get books in their earliest form—the author’s raw and unedited content as they write—so you can take advantage of these technologies long before the official release of these titles.

This will be the Appendix of the final book. Please note that the GitHub repo will be made active later on.

If you’d like to be actively involved in reviewing and commenting on this draft, please reach out to the editor at [e-mail].

Power BI Desktop is excellent for building models, but sooner or later every Power BI modeler runs into a problem that is hard or impossible to solve using just Power BI Desktop. This is where external tools come into play.

Picture this: users report that a Power BI report is slow. You open the report in Power BI Desktop, turn on the Performance Analyzer, and confirm what users are seeing. One visual takes several seconds to render. That information helps, but it also raises new questions. Is the time spent scanning data or evaluating DAX? Is a single measure responsible, or is the slowdown caused by how visuals and filters interact with each other?

This is often the point when modelers turn to an external tool called DAX Studio. By connecting the model to DAX Studio, the guessing stops. Instead of looking at visuals for clues, you can see the exact queries the engine is executing, measure where time is actually spent, and focus your efforts ...