11 Comments
When querying from SQL, or other source that are not case insensitive, forcing case sensitivity isn't efficient. It increases risk of developer making mistakes. They test in SQL, the query works perfectly. Copy in PowerBI, then spend time fixing case-sensitivity. There is no added value.
Rather, it should be a property. For people that need case-sensitivity, they can have it. People that don't can turn it off.
Power-BI needs to be flexible and to adapt to the multiple sources.- Hello, As a new Power BI user, I was quite surprised to discover that string comparisons are not case-sensitive by default in many scenarios. From a data management and analytics perspective, this can be a significant limitation, as there are legitimate use cases where "a" and "A" represent different values and should be treated accordingly. While I understand that case-insensitive behavior may be convenient for some users, it should at least be configurable. Modern professional data platforms typically provide an option to choose between case-sensitive and case-insensitive comparisons, allowing the behavior to align with business requirements and source system semantics. The current approach can lead to unexpected results, especially when working with identifiers, codes, or datasets originating from systems where case sensitivity is meaningful. I believe Power BI would benefit from offering a global or model-level setting that allows developers to define how text comparisons and relationships should handle case sensitivity. Thank you for considering this enhancement. It is difficult to understand why such a fundamental capability is not available as a configurable option in a modern enterprise-grade analytics platform.
- This is a huge problem for the architecture/engineering/construction community (BIM/VDC). We want to use the unique IDs of the IFC file format (IFC GUID) for 3D buildings and their data, but it's a case sensitive key. Example: 2F$L$p5YXH0f$q71wYJpYv As a result, what should be a simple logical connection becomes a data nightmare and many people from the BIM world who look at PowerBI immeditely consider it innapropriate as a solution for the data handling of BIM/VDC documents. - Also consider that many people who are not eagle-eyed will not notice the defficiency of the data, as Marco and Alberto said: "Users are not expected to even realize that incorrect results might be linked to case-sensitivity" https://www.sqlbi.com/articles/letter-case-sensitivity-in-dax-power-bi-and-analysis-services/
- Status added:Needs Votes
- To set a case-sensitive collation on the semantic model, configure the Collation option with a case-sensitive collation value when creating the model. This setting applies to the entire model and cannot be configured at a more granular level. For example, you can set the collation to
SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CS_AS, which is a case-sensitive collation. Astonishing this hasn't been implemented yet. Seems like an easy low-hanging fruit win with big gains. Most average users don't want case sensitivity for a text search because you never know how the data will include a keyword text string, and case can simply be a matter of it starting a sentence verses middle/end. If DAX is case insensitive, why are the UI level searches? Default should be case insensitive, or even better allow developers to turn on/off whichever they prefer.
On the long list of basic features that Power BI does not prioritize as it does not sound sexy, this might be the biggest missing feature. It is so easy to implement, yet so important. Come on Microsoft
Nothing on this yet? It's a very important matter, cannot believe it's been ignored for so long.
This issue needs to be addressed, when using search in slicer it makes sense to have the option for case insensitive.
The lack of case sensitivity and cases changing on load from Power Query to Power BI entirely prevents me from using Power BI in many cases. I'll be moving away from Power BI as a reporting solution solely because of this issue.
