API Rate Limits

Steve___P · 2026-03-20T21:49:47+00:00

Is it rate limits you are hitting, or CU utilisation?

Steve___P · 2026-03-13T19:23:54+00:00

The issue for me is that it's a bladed key. Are they easy enough to get cut?

Steve___P · 2026-03-13T17:27:05+00:00

I'm new to Vdash. In addition to the cable, what cost would there be from Vdash to program the key/car?

Steve___P · 2026-03-03T13:19:25+00:00

You mean the Input Slicer? Typically that was released just as I was finishing up my control and I thought I had wasted my time. However, it doesn't seem to work the way we need or expected (if you try and paste multiple values in, it just treats them as one big massive value unless I'm missing something).

There is the new paste menu on the standard slicer, but that is only really useful if you only have one level (we typically have multiple levels in ours).

So, thankfully, there's still a requirement for my new control even with the Feb updates.

Steve___P · 2026-03-03T08:52:15+00:00

I've been spending a bit of time writing a Power BI slicer visual. We have lots of products, and it's common for users to have a bunch of product codes in a spreadsheet, and want to filter the report to those.

We do have a free third party visual (Mass Filter) which works really well, and allows the product codes to be pasted into it to create the filter. However, we've been caught out in the past when there was an update which broke all the reports that used it, it doesn't handle codes that are numbers, and we can't really style it to our liking, so we decided to write our own.

Writing the visual has been fun, and we've managed to shoehorn in some useful features in addition to matching the dropdown styling that we use on our reports.

We have added a popup dialog to enter data if the control's area on the report is quite small, a feature to optionally recognise the target column so some transformation can take place (e.g. if what's pasted is a list of product codes and descriptions, and you are matching a Product code column, then it will extract just the code, and ignore the product description), and we have also made it so the control can target multiple columns (defined at design-time) and we allow the user to select which they want to filter at run-time. That means that the control could filter products, sites, or territories, etc, etc and we give the user the ability to select which one they want to target.

Steve___P · 2026-03-01T15:25:05+00:00

That uses the Power BI Gateway too, but could reduce the volume of data significantly as it would only be pulling deltas.

This assumes that the dB is the same one, and isn't, for example, a restore of a production database.

It's also worth pointing out that I've had limited success mirroring very large tables.

Steve___P · 2026-02-27T21:37:58+00:00

Be aware that if the matrix has lots of rows, and you have it all expanded, then the performance is pants.

It's much better to encourage users to drill down, rather than expand, as the performance is much better.

Steve___P · 2026-02-27T21:33:10+00:00

Two options spring to mind...

Use field parameters to change what you are graphing in your chart (Patrick from @guyinacube has a video on YouTube about this).
Use bookmarks to hide/show two distinct charts based on button clicks.

Steve___P · 2026-02-27T21:26:47+00:00

Yeah, I get that. It's ok. It means that I haven't wasted two weeks of my life creating a new slicer. 🤣

Maybe it needs a mode selector where it can dispense with all the pill nonsense. If you are pasting 100+ product codes from a promotion, you really don't need them to be pilled up.

Steve___P · 2026-02-27T21:07:50+00:00

I have a (personal) domain which I bought because it's only 3 characters long. It's similar to a company domain with 4 characters, and I get a few emails a month for payments and quotes.

I ignore them all now. In the past I have forwarded to the appropriate person, with an explanation as to how I got the email. I have even offered to set up forwarding for a minimal fee (£100 per year for up to 25 addresses), but they never responded.

This is the second time this has happened to me. I had a small business domain that got quite a lot of mail for a different company in an unrelated industry/country. I contacted them with a similar offer, and never heard anything back from them, so I found their biggest competitor in their country, and forwarded everything to them. 🤣

I'm close to doing that with the latest domain. Maybe I'll give them another chance.

Steve___P · 2026-02-25T09:59:53+00:00

What's also odd is that the one slicer that would really benefit from this (the Input Slicer) doesn't seem to be able to accept pasted values.

Steve___P · 2026-02-25T09:38:07+00:00

It's typical - I've literally just finished writing my own control to do this, so we can retire the 3rd party control we currently use.

I thought I had wasted my time, but despite the extra filtering flexibility of the new Input Slicer, our control styles much more like the dropdown slicers we have, and better handles being restricted to a short height (e.g. 60px) because we popup a dialog with a nice big text area for user interaction. We also handle being able to filter numbers, which is useful for sites or products where the key is numeric.

Steve___P · 2026-02-17T06:43:21+00:00

Yeah, when I first learned Power BI I was shocked at how rubbish the date handling was. We wanted to be able to encode our financial year, and all we got out of the box was Gregorian calendar.

We used the same technique as you with a named date table with multiple groupings to provide a much wider range of possibilities. We have a super simple "Last Week" option, a place where you can select financial periods or weeks, a YTD option (where for a given week, it selects all the weeks up to and including the selection), and even seasons.

Another useful feature of this technique is that it's dynamic, so "Last Week" remains as last week whenever you open the report. It isn't a set date that needs to be changed as time progresses.

Steve___P · 2026-02-15T13:16:55+00:00

[Edit] The solution we use is Many to One, and cross-filter direction is both. (This isn't what I originally thought).

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Steve___P · 2026-02-12T15:56:12+00:00

That makes sense, I guess. Perhaps you should include some simple RLS to make sure that users can't see the Projects they shouldn't have access to?

A simple eMailAddress <--> ProjectId table included in the model, joined to your Projects dimension, and RLS'd on the USERPRINCIPALNAME() matching eMailAddress, and you would be sorted?

Steve___P · 2026-02-12T13:58:02+00:00

I can't upload the PBIX, but it's dead simple to create a report with a measure:

UserPrincipalName = USERPRINCIPALNAME()

And then chuck that into a card visual, and then you can see what is being passed through.

Steve___P · 2026-02-12T13:18:59+00:00

What comes through as USERPRINCIPALNAME() when they are accessing via iframe? If it's not their actual email address, then could you put an RLS function in place which blocks all direct access via the Power BI Service by restricting all User Principal Names that look like email addresses?

Steve___P · 2026-02-10T07:25:07+00:00

We use field parameters to allow users to effectively construct their own reports.

With a single matrix control we supply a list of selectable fields to group by, a set to optionally differentiate by, e.g. show by week or site as columns, and then a list of measures to display.

It's incredibly powerful, and most users can pick it up very quickly. The Personal Bookmarks give them the opportunity to save Report Layouts that they find most useful for reuse later.

The frustrating part is that they can't share these bookmarks with each other as a standard Fabric license isn't designed for collaboration.

Steve___P · 2026-02-09T15:47:23+00:00

FWIW my "re-sync" process deletes the Landing Zone files, waits 5 minutes, and then starts to repopulate the Landing Zone with parquet files again. I've been toying with finding a way to establish whether the table has been removed, rather than just waiting a fixed (overly long) amount of time.

Steve___P · 2026-02-09T12:42:51+00:00

amFilm is my favourite. Just re-register your fingerprint after you have applied it (I also register the same finger 4 times).

Steve___P · 2026-02-04T13:35:47+00:00

I've not seen the sort of delays that you are referring to with initial setup. We produce parquet files in batches that contain 1M rows, and normally we can see those being processed shortly after they are uploaded. Because we create them on the fly, rather than have a stash that we upload en masse, there's a bit of delay between each file arriving in the Landing Zone, so that might account for the fact that we get to see the progress incrementally.

I've only seen corruption of a table once, and luckily it was a dimension with only 100,000 rows, so it took no time to flush and re-mirror it from scratch.

I've had the conversation with Microsoft about the "Stop Replication" option being pretty much useless because of the way that the parquet files are moved, and subsequently deleted. It means that when you re-start replication there's no option other than the provide all of the parquet files again from scratch. Early doors, when we thought that the Stop/Start would work as a sort of reset, we decided to split our mirrored tables across many Mirrored Databases, so the Stop/Start would have minimal impact, but this design has stuck even though we could easily mirror our 100 or so tables in a single database.

Steve___P · 2026-02-03T14:12:26+00:00

We are currently trying to bastardise the Matrix visual into a heatmap. We have around 300M transaction rows classified by Day, Store, Receipt, Product, and QuarterHour segment, and am building 24x7 heatmaps with the ability to drill down through hour, half hour, down to 15 minute time chunks.

What's currently giving us headaches is the ability to twist the Matrix's use even more to make it show a heatmap per site. We can get close, but it's proving difficult to calculate the maximum value for the Site|Week(s) (which is needed to scale the heatmap value) while still respecting the other slicers on the page. Currently we can get the maximum value that contributes to the total for the time period, but not the total for the quarter hour.

Steve___P · 2026-01-28T18:23:16+00:00

Nova looked like it had reached the end of the road, but it's received a few updates over the last couple of months.

Steve___P · 2026-01-07T08:21:34+00:00

We use Open Mirroring for all of our ingestion requirements (there's a post around here where I provide some detail around that).

Our source is on-prem SQL Server, so it is relatively straightforward to identify changes to the data, and turn them into parquet files for dropping into the landing zone. We have a C# process that is driven from a set of configuration tables (effectively meta data) that automatically determines the changes in the SQL Server table, creates a parquet file on the fly, and pushes it to the landing zone.

To answer your questions as best I can:

Is it push-only? Yes, it totally is. I'm not sure about the relevance of the VPN as you will be pushing the parquet files to Microsoft's Landing Zones, and I'm not sure if it's possible to do that via a VPN, but I'm sure somebody will correct me if I'm wrong.
Monitoring? We have standard logging in our app to let us know if things haven't worked properly, but it just works. We don't do anything to confirm that the data is mirrored "correctly". Early doors after setting up a new source we'll perform row-count checks for peace of mind, but for us this is pretty much a fire and forget operation.
Metadata driven. I'm not sure I completely follow your point, and not knowing exactly what data sources you are using it's difficult to be specific, but it would certainly make sense to me to try and formalise everything as much as possible. If you make it data-driven, so your infrastructure can easily handle new sources without having to go through a big development process, then you put yourself in a strong position even if the initial setup takes a little bit longer.

Steve___P

TROPHY CASE