This weekend, I had the honor of presenting my Power BI precon for SQL Saturday Cleveland. I’ll be giving the same presentation March 16th in Cincinnati.

Inevitably, there are always some questions that I don’t have an answer for.  What I like to do is circle back and try to get some answers for the people who attended.

Do clustered data gateways provide load balancing?

Back in

That being said, I created a view in the main database pointing to a different database and there wasn’t any issue. Going further, I decided to test out picking on database and hand typing a query pointing to a different database.

And it works! It’s very interesting, I wonder where the limitations comes from if it’s so easy to get around.

What’s the best way to connect to a Web API application?

One attendee said they use ASP.net Web API as middleware for a large number of databases and tables. So what is the best way to connect to Web API for Power BI?

Steve Howard has a great blog post about different options. Probably the best option is to add OData support to your Web API.

If the API is complex and OData is not an option, custom data connectors are worth looking into. You’ll be writing a lot of M code, but it can be a good way to encapsulate that complexity.

Does Power BI support SAP Universe?

So the situation for SAP Universe is a bit weird. Back in 2014 they added support for SAP Business Objects.

But then later they removed it because of licensing concerns? It’s not entirely clear to me. That being said, there is a request for support to be added back.

Digging a bit deeper, it sounds like there might be a workaround using the SAP OData API, but that’s not the ideal solution.

What are the best options for sharing reports with external customers?

A question I here a lot is how do you share with customers and deal with multi-tenant databases.

Well very recently, back in November 2017, Power BI added support for external users with Azure B2B. This includes support for row-level security, which means you can have all your data in a central database and limit a customer to just their own data. This is very exciting.

There is a whitepaper if you want to learn more.

I was working on a demo for my upcoming Pluralsight

It used to be that you could look at the data model and see a version number.

But now, it’s almost entirely unintelligible. The only thing you can read is “This backup was created using xpress 9 compression.”

A little

When imported into power bi Desktop, the new compression model is dramatically more efficient. 184 KB versus 2,288 KB.

What I haven’t figured out yet is if this impacts in-memory use or just when it’s saved to disk. Still it’s nice to see Microsoft continuing to make improvements.