Monthly Archives: March 2018

Are local credentials or passwords stored in the Power BI Desktop file?

Deployment & Administration

When I presented on Power BI at Cleveland, I wrote up a blog post with all the questions I didn’t have an immediate answer to. I presented last week at Cincinatti and wanted to do the same thing.

This time there were some more difficult questions so I’m going to have to split it up into multiple blog posts.

Are local credentials stored in the Power BI Desktop file?

With SSIS, you have to be careful to export the SSIS files without any sensitive information included. But what about Power BI? If you save the .PBIX files on OneDrive, can you be exposing yourself to a security risk?

Looking at things, it looks like credentials for data sources are stored globally, so one wouldn’t expect them to be in the .pbix files.

image

So, first I turned the PBIX file into a zip file and poked around. I didn’t see anything suspicious.

Next, I ran image

If we open user.zip we find a folder called Credentials, with a single encrypted file inside. I’m willing to bet this is where the passwords are being stored.

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Come see me present!

If you are interested in attending a future precon, I’ll be presenting at the following locations for 2018:

  1. Rochester, March 23rd
  2. Philadelphia, April 20th
  3. Wheeling, April 27th

TSQL Tuesday #100: Industry changes and Meidinger’s Law

SQL Server

MJTuesday

Meidinger’s law

To celebrate the 100th TSQL Tuesday, this month’s image

Maybe a bit image

And what about image

We are all imposters

If you are going to change jobs every two years, then that’s how long you have to learn before it’s on to the next thing.

I’ve had my freakout about the data platform constantly broadening. Mindy Curnutt has a great podcast episode about imposter syndrome. We are all worried about the pace of change.

And I think Meidinger’s law is our saving grace in some sort of way. Things keep changing, we have to keep learning. But how much we actually have to learn is constrained by that 22 year old drinking red-bull with no family obligations.

Throwing Darts

Oh yeah, we were supposed to be predicting the future. Well I think the fact that we are all going to be replaced by that 22 year old some day gives us a hint at the future.

I think more and more things are going to be abstracted away. We’ve seen it with virtualization. We’ve seen it with the cloud. These abstractions mean the new guy can learn new, more important things. He doesn’t have to be intimately familiar with RAID 5. He doesn’t have to have the OSI model memorized.

I think we are seeing it now with data science and machine learning. So much of those areas require a Phd and years and years of study. But things like Azure machine learning and Azure cognitive services are going to get easier and easier. So easy that even the new guy can do it.