Designing Column-Level Security

While not as common as row-level security (RLS), there are times when you may wish to hide particular columns in a semantic model from one group of report viewers, but not others.

While not accessible in Power BI Desktop, the Analysis Services tabular semantic model does support object-level security (OLS) for securing tables and columns. This method of securing objects currently requires third-party tools, such as Tabular Editor. In addition, this method has the advantage of securing even the metadata about the objects such that report viewers without access will not even know that the tables and columns exist in the model.

However, there are severe disadvantages to OLS as well. For example, including a column secured by OLS in a visual or measure breaks that visual or measure for users who are unable to access the OLS-secured column. Thus, it becomes difficult; if not impossible, to create reports that work for a variety of users with and...