Dynamic security made easy with SSAS 2016 and Power BI
Dynamic security is one of those design patterns you hear mentioned every now and then by the seasoned SSAS pro’s. It is a design pattern that allows you to move the user management from the user and role management of the SSAS metadata to be part the data itself. This makes it much easier to add and remove users without having to update the cube each time, this is mostly very handy in larger implementations. In order to implement this in tabular models you had to know some tricks and learn some DAX (as you can read in this tutorial here) but in SQL Server 2016 the Tabular model (and Power BI as it is the same engine) make this easier using Bi Directional cross-filtering. How this works is described in a whitepaper that describes Bi Directional cross-filtering in detail. But in order to give this powerful feature a bit more attention I decided to also post this part on my blog.