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Microsoft Idea

Power BI

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Time Intelligence Date hierarchies management and enhancement

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Josef Jurák's profile image

Josef Jurák on 07 Feb 2021 11:49:06

Time intelligence, which automatically creating Y-Q-M-D Hierarchies, are very helpful. Especially when PBI/Tabular does not support native role-playing dimensions (by design), and you need create date hierarchies for multiple date columns. So, it is great.

But in some cases, in large tables with many date columns, it’s performance killer. Best practice is turn off time intelligence in this case.

Now, only option is turn on/off Time intelligence for whole pbix report. When this option is turned on, PBI Desktop automatically create date hierarchy (based on internal template) for every column, including hidden columns. There no way how individual on column enable/disable time intelligence, no way how to disable time intelligence on hidden columns, no way how customize time intelligence.

Will be great improvement when:
1) Will be possible disable time intelligence(auto creating date hierarchies) on hidden columns (they are typically not used in visualization and are used only in DAX expressions). I think, it is very easy to implement.

2) Will be better when possible enable or disable time intelligence on selected date columns, as I want.

3) Will be great to able edit Time Intelligence template (internal DateTableTemplate…) which is used for creating date hierarchy on every date column. I mean, customize hierarchy to Year-Month, or create secondary hierarchy Year-Week-Day, change logic to some fiscal calendar, and so on.

4) Will be superior to able edit and create multiple Time Intelligence templates, and able choose right hierarchy template on every date or time column as you want.

Thanks