How Tabular Editor 2 Can Help You Find Data Model Problems

If you work with tabular data models, you know how quickly development and maintenance can become cumbersome in Visual Studio. Automatic processing can slow down development, updates can trigger additional processing, and collaborating across different versions can create conflicts.

Tabular Editor 2 gives developers another way to work with tabular models for SQL Server Analysis Services, Azure Analysis Services, and Power BI Premium. Because you can edit BIM files without accessing the underlying model data, it can make common modeling tasks faster and easier. Developers can work offline, access multiple BIM files, organize measures with folders and calculation groups, create custom scripts, and use the Best Practice Analyzer to identify potential issues. (That last capability is particularly useful!)

The Best Practice Analyzer can help you find problems within an individual model. But the types of problems it finds, especially when they appear repeatedly across multiple models, can also tell you something about the health of your broader data environment.

If your team is continually correcting the same relationship, performance, security, or modeling issues, the question eventually becomes bigger than how to fix them in Tabular Editor. Why do these problems keep making their way into your models in the first place?

Using the Best Practice Analyzer in Tabular Editor 2

Tabular Editor's Best Practice Analyzer evaluates model metadata against defined rules and flags potential violations.

The following rules are taken from Microsoft’s Power BI Blog. We recommend using these rules, as they will be effective for a vast majority of organizations and applications. These will also help ensure smooth syncing. These rules cover several areas of model development, including:

• DAX expressions: Issues such as unnecessary IFERROR functions, improperly qualified references, or inefficient virtual relationships
• Model structure and performance: Excessive bidirectional relationships, snowflake schemas, high-cardinality columns, unnecessary calculated columns, and other structures that can affect performance
• Formatting and naming: Inconsistent naming conventions, missing format strings, and improperly configured columns
• Maintenance: Unused columns, measures, data sources, or relationships that add unnecessary complexity
• Security: Row-level security configurations and other practices that can create performance or governance concerns

Not every rule applies to every model or organization. Tabular Editor allows developers to disable rules, exclude particular objects, and assign severity levels to help prioritize violations.

The goal isn't necessarily to make every warning disappear: it’s to understand which rules matter for your environment and whether the violations point to isolated development issues or broader patterns.

How to Load Best Practice Rules in Tabular Editor 2

Once you have Tabular Editor 2 installed, updating your rules is easy.

1. Launch Tabular Editor

2. Open Tabular Editor and run the following code in the Advanced Scripting window:

System.Net.WebClient w = new System.Net.WebClient(); 

string path = System.Environment.GetFolderPath(System.Environment.SpecialFolder.LocalApplicationData);

string url = "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/microsoft/Analysis-Services/master/BestPracticeRules/BPARules.json";

string downloadLoc = path+@"\TabularEditor\BPARules.json";

w.DownloadFile(url, downloadLoc);

3. Close and relaunch Tabular Editor.

4. Start modeling!

Some Tips:

• You can disable any of the rules that may not apply. Within Tabular Editor 2, go to the “Manage Best Practices Rules” window and simply uncheck the rule to disable it. You can also disable rules for particular objects when in the Best Practice Analyzer.
• You can also set severity levels per rule. This won’t change how Best Practice Analyzer flags violations, but it will sort those violations so your team can prioritize manual follow-up.

When It's More Than a Tabular Editor Problem

Tabular Editor 2 is a valuable tool for improving individual tabular models. But better tooling can't solve every problem within a growing Power BI environment.

It may be time to look beyond individual fixes when

• The same best practice violations appear across multiple models
• Different developers or departments follow different modeling standards
• Reports become slower as data volumes and reporting needs grow
• Your team spends significant time maintaining models and correcting recurring problems
• Business logic is spread across source systems, Power Query, models, and reports
• Different reports produce different answers to the same business question
• Power BI is in place, but users still don't fully trust the information it provides

At that point, fixing another calculated column or relationship may address the immediate problem without addressing its source.

The underlying issue may be your data architecture, unclear modeling standards, inconsistent business definitions, or the way information moves from source systems into your reporting environment.

What Your Best Practice Violations May Be Telling You

Finding a violation is useful. Finding the same violations across dozens of models is something else.

For example:

Recurring patterns can show where development standards, architecture, or governance haven't kept pace with the reporting environment.

This becomes particularly relevant as more people begin developing reports and models. One developer may handle relationships one way while another takes a different approach. Business logic may end up divided between source systems, Power Query, models, and individual reports. Measures that should mean the same thing may be calculated differently across departments.

Tabular Editor can help identify the symptoms. Addressing why they keep occurring requires looking at how your organization builds and manages its data models as a whole.

Build Better Models From a Better Foundation

Tabular Editor 2 can help developers work faster, identify best practice violations, and build cleaner tabular models. It can also provide an early warning when the same modeling problems keep appearing throughout an organization.

If your team is spending more time correcting models than using them, Team SCS can help you look upstream.

We work with organizations to improve the data architecture and modeling practices behind Power BI and other Microsoft data technologies. That can mean identifying where recurring problems originate, establishing consistent modeling standards, improving performance, or restructuring the underlying data environment so individual reports aren't responsible for solving problems that belong elsewhere.

If Tabular Editor keeps finding the same problems, it’s time to find out why.

Superior Consulting Services (SCS) is a Microsoft-centric technology firm providing innovative solutions that enable our clients to solve business problems. We offer full-scale data unification, modeling, and reporting services.