Row-Level Security in Power BI: The complete guide of creating different views of the data for the same Power BI report

by Reza Rad

I have been writing and presenting about Row-Level Security in Power BI for many years. Through the comments and feedback I got from my presentations and articles, I felt a need for a place to have everything gathered in one place. The lack of a book that explains everything about the current subject motivated me to end up gathering all my articles in this book. The result is what you are reading.Row-Level Security in Power BI is not about sharing your content. It is, on the other hand, about sharing the same content with a different audience in the way that they see different views of the data. They will have different access to the data. Some of them might see the entire data, and some others might see part of the data that they are authorized to see.Instead of creating multiple reports with the same format, fields, calculations, and visualizations, and only making them different in filtering, the correct way to do it is through row-level security. This will make sure you have the maximum consistency and minimum maintenance for your Power BI project.This is not a book about theories. This is a hands-on book. There are tons of demos and examples with the code samples that you can try. You will learn through this book, what is row-level security. You will learn different types of security and patterns in which you will see the most common challenges for implementing the security and the solution to save them.The book starts with the basics of row-level security, then you will learn about static vs. dynamic row-level security. You will learn patterns such as everyone see their own data, but the manager sees a different view or users and profiles for branch managers. Or the organizational hierarchy, or even the many-to-many relationship challenge of row-level security etc. through this book.This book is not about how to create a report, build a visualization, connect to a dataset, or set up a gateway. If you want to learn those, I do recommend reading my other Power BI online book, from Rookie to Rock Star.

109 pages, Paperback

Published January 9, 2020

Reviews

[O · Rating 1 out of 5]

I purchased this book from an independent book store. Although the content maybe useful I was angry to find it is nothing more than a printed version of 9 blog articles written by Reza. Each chapter is the name of the blog post so easily found online. No additional content has been added for anyone purchasing the book. In fact, buying the book puts the reader at a disadvantage because at least in the original blog post the hyperlink was clickable to (for example) the data source. The book has been so hastily copy/pasted from the original articles that they didn't bother changing the "... found HERE" to "...found at www....". Bearing in mind that the book is printed on approx. A4 paper the font and image size are obnoxious. Several pages have barely more than a few words and a huge image which could have been scaled down. If you spend 30mins to an hour you could collate these blog posts into a 50 page A4 landscape document for your own reference.