Forum Discussion
Microsoft EmployeeShare your thoughts on DirectQuery for Power BI datasets and Azure Analysis Services (preview)
Advocate IHi! We have been using this feature for almost 2 years. There is one limitation that I see that no one commented on.
I am now used to "Limited relationships" when connecting tables in DQ mode from different sources, or even btw imported and DQ tables. But when we have tables in different datasets in the same workspace I would have expected this to be considered the same source.
Would be nice to have a single Power BI workspace considered as the same island and thus any 1:* and 1:1 relationships be considered "regular".
Our use case is that we have many datasets and the idea was to let some self service users with Power BI desktop knowledge to "mix and match" to build their own datamodel without needing to import any data as everything is already available in the same workspace. The limited relationship concept is a little bit tricky and harder to take into account for end users (specially since there is almost no warning in Power BI dekstop about what this entails). Some use cases (requiring regular relationship) that are easy to achieve with data imported in the same dataset cannot be done when using data that is already imported in the workspace BUT in different datasets.
Microsoft EmployeeHi ManuGP - thanks for the feedback. However, this is not how this is designed. Even if items are in the same workspace they are not going to be considered as one source group: a source group is tied to the source (each DQ source is a source group), with the exception of all Imported sources being the same source group.
- ManuGP
The thing is: If I have different Power queries in DQ to the same system (even in separate schemas in databricks for example) they are considered by Power BI as in the same source group and the relationships between them are regular. I don't know what is the technical restriction but I would expect the same when connecting in DQ to different datasets in the same PBI workspace.
The current behavior pushes me towards thinking I should put all the tables in the (in 30+) datasets into one enormous dataset, but I'm sure that will have many drawbacks.
Or is there another setup that would work better for this use case? Any thoughts are welcome.
- jeroenterheerdt
It's just a design choice from our side, given that we manage the Power BI dataset for you.
- ManuGP
Then that's my feedback: if relationships across datasets were regular (by considering one PBI workspace as a single source group) it would make this preview feature much more powerful.
Thanks!