Like many others, I have not been an advocate of using Direct Query, it has long had many concerns diminishing its’ overall usefulness with one of the major key issues being performance. The Microsoft Power BI team has made major strides to mitigate the concerns around performance by adding two new key features: Composite Model and Aggregations. This blog will not discuss aggregations. However, we will briefly discuss the composite model and how we can use this to make Dynamic Security better.

The composite model simply allows users to import data and use Direct Query in the same data model. This has long been a point of contention for Power BI users because combining these two features into one model adds a lot of value. In this blog, I am going to briefly explain how this model helps to improve dynamic row level security.

I was sure I had previously blogged about dynamic row level security but I don’t see a post so I am going to re-direct you elsewhere. If you are interested in learning exactly how to implement dynamic security you can check it out here: Dynamic Security implementation

I am a huge advocate for Dynamic Security. Dynamic security allows you to create a single role in Power BI and then you can manage all your user security in a single table. Take a look at the following table which I am now storing in SQL Server:

So why would the composite model make dynamic security better?

Great question. Historically, I would always import data into Power BI, including the dynamic security table. The problem with this method is what happens with the security of the data if the model is not being refreshed? For example, I may reassign which users have access to which sales territories in my security table but if data models in the service are not being refreshed then the security is not being refreshed and thus users will have access to data they should not have.

Now, with the composite model I can still import all my reporting data but then I can set up a direct query connection to my dynamic security table. This means that all of Power BI models using this table will always be up to date!

Hopefully you can find many more useful scenarios for the composite model! Thanks for reading my blog!