Configuring the "Manage Aggregation" option

Power BI Data Model
1

Hi everyone,

Do we have resources on how best to use the Aggregation option in Power BI? I have tried to serach for it but havent managed it.

Thanks,

Jawed

2

@Jawed ,

You know, I don’t think we do. I could be wrong, but nothing comes to mind. The best thing I’ve seen on aggregations is a recent series done by Phil Seamark:

GIAC also did a good series on this:

I hope this is helpful.

  • Brian
3

Thank you, @BrianJ. That is what I thought. I couldn’t find anything here. This could be a suggestion that if something is put together here, it would be much appreciated. I did have a look at the GIAC ones on youtube but given that I and many people here in the Enterprise DNA are not necessarily coming from a solid IT background, I always learn more and enjoy the approach we have here.

Currently, I am building a financial dashboard and I am accessing at least two years’ worth of data. Whilst things are building up nicely, the refresh time is in several minutes. I wanted to see if Aggregation can help me on this but needed a bit more information given that I am at the beginning of building my dashboard and could easily adjust/change/add stuff in my model.

I will Have a look at the Phil ones as well.

Thank you

4

@Jawed ,

That’s great to hear. I will talk with the Expert team and see who has knowledge of and experience with aggregations, who potentially could put together some content on this for us.

Two other things to consider apart from aggregations:

  1. Are there elements of the dashboard you’re building that can be pushed further “upstream” either to the data warehouse/source or to Power Query
  2. Has the current code been optimized? Several minutes for two years’ worth of data sounds to me like there’s substantial room for improvement in the speed of the code itself.
  • Brian
5

@BrianJ,

At the moment, I am entirely working on Power Query to model how my data is pulled. this involves pulling all Sales Invoices, Credit Notes, Bills and Supplier Credits, Journals, Deposits, etc. I am slimming them as much as possible to then append them together into one slim but long data (as recommended here) to be pushed to Power BI. So, even at this stage, it takes me sometimes 5-10 minutes to refresh data. When I did a bit of search, I came across the Aggregation so wanted to see if I can use it. Phil’s suggestion involves SQL involvement which I know nothing about.

Is there any way for me to share my Power BI file for you to have a look at? Not sure if any data will appear in the tables given you dont have the credentials to access the accounting source.

6

@BrianJ & @Jawed Aggregations are going to be a part of the DAX Studio course, but only from the performance point of view as it important to figure out when Aggregation is used and when it is not. More detailed explanation on setting up aggregations, precedence and other stuff can be covered separately.

1 Like
7

Thanks @AntrikshSharma. Do you mean that this is already in the pipeline?

8

@Jawed Yup.

9

Hi @Jawed, we’ve noticed that no response has been received from you since a few days ago.

We just want to check if you still need further help with this post?

In case there won’t be any activity on it in the next few days, we’ll be tagging this post as Solved.