Tag Archives: extension

Release of Power BI Studio v2.0 (VSCode extension)

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Due to the great feedback I have received for the first version of my VSCode extension to mange Power BI objects from within VSCode I decided to continue working on it and am finally happy to share that I am releasing a new version – v2.0!

If you already had the previous version installed in VSCode, you do not have to do anything as it will update automatically. If you are a new user, you can install it from the gallery or search for “Power BI Studio” in the VSCode extensions tab.

Besides adding some new features I also changed the name to “Power BI Studio” to make it more accessible and ease communication. While it is technically still a VSCode extension and still requires VSCode (desktop client or vscode.dev) to run, I think “Power BI Studio” is a much better term and also refers to other established Power BI tools like DAX Studio and SQL Server Management Studio which a lot of users are already familiar with.

But there are also a lot of new features – here are the most important ones:

  • Integration with External Tools in Power BI Desktop
  • Show Memory Statistics for Power BI Datasets
  • new config powerbi.workspaceFilter to filter workspaces
  • support for Fabric APIs in Power BI notebooks
  • a lot of bug fixes and minor improvements on existing features

Integration with External Tools in Power BI Desktop

You can now start any of your External Tools you have configured for Power BI Desktop directly from VSCode to automatically connect to an online dataset. (Seriously, how often did you have to search for the proper connection string when you wanted to used DAX Studio or Tabular Editor?!)

Besides the direct integration with Power BI Desktop External Tools you can also simply copy the connectionstring from the context menu of a dataset!

Show Memory Statistics for Power BI Datasets

When analyzing the performance of a Power BI Datasets it is very crucial to understand the memory footprint of your model. To support admins and developers alike to investigate in memory issues, I integrated the DAX queries from my fellow Microsoft Data Platform MVP Hariharan Rajendran that exposes the memory consumption into a pre-defined notebook which can easily be opened from the context menu of the dataset:

The scripts/DAX queries will be updated constantly whenever new functionality becomes available. If you have any ideas/queries you want to have included, please reach out to me!

Other features

The new config setting powerbi.workspaceFilter allows you to use a Regular Expression (RegEx) to filter the workspaces you want to be shown in the UI. This can be very useful if you are working in a large enterprise with many workspaces and you only want to work with a small subset of them. As it is a RegEx, it allows very fine-grained and also very modular filters and you can use | (=RegEx OR) to chain different conditions. To filter for all workspaces that contain Finance or are production workspaces (suffix [PROD]) you could use “Finance|\[PROD\]”

Using Power BI notebooks you can now also query Fabric REST API endpoints.as they are using the very same authentication in the background. To do so, you need to specify the full URL of the Fabric API you want to call or use the command SET API_PATH = https://api.fabric.microsoft.com upfront. As of now the Fabric API does not come with autocompletion so you need to know which endpoints you want to call. Please refer to the official Fabric REST API documentation for more details.

GET https://api.fabric.microsoft.com/v1/workspaces

There will be some more integration with Fabric in the very near future so please stay tuned!

For all other changes/bugfixes/improvements please refer to the official documentation and changelog.

Power BI Studio will still be developed as Open-Source Software (OSS) and contributors are very welcome. Also if you have any other feedback, feature requests or simply found a bug, please file a ticket in the repository.

Databricks VSCode Extension – Release v1.0!

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As you probably know from my previous posts, my colleagues at paiqo.com and I are constantly working to improve our VSCode extension for Databricks. Almost every month we silently release a new version to the VSCode gallery so you get the latest features. However, as this is a special release, I am also writing a dedicated blog post for it

We are very happy to finally announce the first official release of our VSCode extension for Databricks!

Probably the biggest and most awaited new feature is the ability to interactively execute your local Spark/SQL/Scala/R code against one of your running Databricks clusters and get the results back in VSCode! At least every 3rd issue that was opened in our Github Repo was requesting this feature and now it is finally here. It integrates seamlessly into VSCode notebooks by automatically creating a new kernel for every active Databricks cluster in your workspace. So just open one of your notebook, select the Databricks cluster kernel and start working!

Integrating it natively with VSCode notebooks brings some very nice features out of the box:

  • leverages all other extensions that work with Python or notebooks:
    syntax highlighting, auto-completion, colored indention levels (e.g using indent-rainbow)
  • use custom renderers to visualize your tables (e.g. vscode-data-tables)

In addition to all the features already mentioned above, it also solves some issues that you may had with other solutions like databricks-connect (which is also deprecated by now). The following things also work with the new Databricks VSCode notebook kernel:

  • full access to the DBFS including mountpoints
  • most dbutils functions like dbutils.secrets
  • magics like %pip, %md and all language-specific magics

However, besides all those great new features and capabilities, there are also some things that still need improvement. Here is a list of known issues:

  • widgets are currently not supported – that’s our highest priority at the moment
  • features from files-in-repos are not yet supported
  • only works with .ipynb files
  • the notebook sometimes opens twice
  • found any other issues? report them at at issues-page

All further details can be found in the README.md of the Github repository.

Let us know what you think of and provide some feedback! If you already had an older version of the extension installed, it will update automatically. If you have not used it yet, just install it directly via the VSCode extensions or download it from the VSCode gallery or our GitHub repository:

VS Code gallery: paiqo.Databricks-VSCode
Github repository: Databricks-VSCode