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The Ultimate Guide to Row-Level and Object-Level Security in Power BI

“Who sees what in the report?” is one of the key security questions in Power BI. Learn two possible ways to implement the access control

Nikola Ilic
Towards Data Science
9 min readAug 16, 2022

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Congratulations! In the previous articles, you’ve learned how to design and build large format datasets, how aggregations can speed up your Power BI reports, and how to leverage composite models feature to get the maximum flexibility in designing enterprise-scale tabular models. Not just that, you’ve also discovered how DirectQuery works in Power BI, what are external tools, and how to extend your data modeling skills by creating calculation groups. Don’t forget some little DAX tricks with variables, virtual relationships, and iterators

It’s time to wrap up by explaining how to secure your data — or maybe it’s better to say — how to control the access to certain portions of your Power BI solution. You can choose between Row-level-security (RLS) and Object-level-security (OLS). To be clear, it’s not that choosing one eliminates the possibility to use another — you can use both RLS and OLS within the same solution.

Let’s make a quick distinction between these two and in which scenarios would make sense to use RLS, OLS, or both. We’ll start with the…

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Towards Data Science
Towards Data Science

Published in Towards Data Science

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Nikola Ilic
Nikola Ilic

Written by Nikola Ilic

Data Mozart — Make Music from your Data!| data-mozart.com | @DataMozart | Microsoft Data Platform MVP | Power BI Addict | Blogger, speaker, learner…

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