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Fabcon Vegas and March 2025 - Preview features

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 Having previously covered the main features announced in the keynote, and Power BI release, it's time to turn our attention to preview features. As always with Preview features, the general rule of thumb is to not use them in production enviroments as they carry the risk of breaking changes being made. If you want to use them, then please do a risk based analysis on each feature - for example, the longer the feature has been in preview the lower the risk of a breaking change being made. To start, we'll turn our attention to the keynote. Keynote Platform enhancements OneLake security This is a major change to the security approach that a lot of people have been waiting for. I did cover it in my Keynote blog given how large a change it is, and if you want to know more please do jump over to my keynote blog. Synapse migration assistant The next announcement was a migration assistant to help move the metadata and data from Synapse Warehouses across into a Fabric Warehouse using a ...
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Fabric - March 2025 release

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 As part of my regular series of thoughts on the new release, this month is going to be slightly different given how many features we've had drop. This blog is going to focus on new features that aren't part of Power BI, not in preview, and didn't make the keynote. If you want to see any of these, have a look here: Keynote Power BI Preview Going forwards, I'm probably going to split out the Power BI updates from the Fabric updates. That way it allows me to go into key features in a bit more detail without ending up with a massive blog. First up, general platform changes - and as always, don't forget to check the blog for more information on any of these features. Fabric platform CI/CD changes Couple of important changes in this space. The main on is the APIs starting to support service principles. A welcome addition that removes the need for service accounts when managing CI/CD via ADO. Whilst the main feature we need of APi support when ADO is the git provider isn...
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Power BI - Fabcon keynote, preview features, and March 2025 announcements

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Yesterday we had an whole host of new features announced in the keynote ( see my first part in this series for more information). Whilst the main announcements focused on Fabric features, we do have a number of announcements to cover specifically around Power BI.  If this proves popular, I'll be moving to seperating out announcements for Power BI and the wider Fabric platform separately. But before we get going on new features, let's address the elephant in the room ... Power BI Price increases As of today, the list price for Power BI has gone up by a significant amount (e.g. Premium per user going from £15.00 to £18.50 per user per month - about a 19% increase). From what I'm seeing this increase is pretty much causing the pushback that partners warned Microsoft would happen. If you are licensing via O365 E5 licensing you are excluded from this price change. The cloud in the silver lining is that whilst it may not seem like Power BI has had many new features in the last ye...
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Fabcon Vegas 2025 - The main keynote announcements

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After last nights keynote, we've so many announcements and new features to digest that it's going to take a few blog posts to get through everything. Given that I'm going to split the announcements to cover: Keynote, Power BI, Fabric, Purview, and preview features. Let's get started. For this blog, if you have a specific feature you want to know more about do have a look at Arun's blog.  Unless it's a really major preview announcement, I'm going to focus on features that have gone GA - the reason, without doing a risk/reward evaluation, I personaly take the view that preview features shouldn't be used in production. That means for the majority, the preview features need to be considered in future roadmap plans but are unlikely to be used today. Up first, copilot. Co-pilot The big announcement in this space is that Copilot is now available at all SKU levels! This is a big one for the SME sector that couldn't justify the cost of an F64 SKU. Now you too...
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Microsoft Fabric - Feb 2025 update

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Firstly, sorry this one's late. Life's been busy and only just getting back up to speed with what I'm now allowed to talk about. Looking back at what was announced in Feb, we start with Power BI Power BI The real major news is that the 32bit version of Power BI desktop will go out of suppot on 2025-06-30. If you are still using this, you need to upgrade to the 64 bit version asap. Other than that, a couple of copilot features have been added to add tablet support to the mobile app and to open the black box on how copilot has found insight. The second of these is a big one, being able to understand the data, measures, and filters that copilot has used is a massive step forwards in increasing confidence in results. Combine this with the new explore this visual option, copilot is getting more and more powerful. Fabric platform This month we see improvements to goverment of the estate within Fabric. Whilst it isn't to the same level as Purview is/will be (e.g. No DQ reports...
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Microsoft Fabric update - Jan '25

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 And we're back. After Microsoft's traditional extended xmas shutdown, it's time to roundup the key features Microsoft released in January. Grab a cupa, and get ready for what promises to be a fairly lengthy post. First up, Power BI. Power BI For the lucky few with an F64 SKU, the new 'answer a question about the data' feature should have just landed for copilot in Power BI. With the ability to personalise these using the Q&A features in Power Bi desktop, they have real promise to help the C-Suite reliably answer regular questions without needing an analyst. As with all things copilot, do thoroughly test for hallucinations before letting it lose with end users. Whilst Microsoft have done a good job of reducing them, the tech isn't perfect yet. Next up, explore this data (preview feature). This allows us to take a visual in a report as the starting point for train of thought analysis. By clicking on the three dots a new window pops up alowing data to be added...
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November '24 - Feature summary review

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 With Ignite, and November, coming to a close, I turn my attention to this month's feature summary.  Unlike normal, I'm not going to focus on the headline announcements (those are covered off in a separate post ). Instead, this month is a dive into the new features that didn't make the keynotes. Power BI Co-pilot updates (Preview) Two great features in Copilot in Power BI mobile and summaries in subscriptions. Two great featured, again hampered by the lack of availability of DCs (especially in the EU). I say it every month, but the sooner Microsoft have more availability the better. Alerts using Activator and RTI in Fabric This is now GA and is way better than the old Power BI alerts. Definitely one to look at, but as a sanity warning Reflex has been renamed Activator. It's the right move, but will catch some people out. Metric sets (Preview) The metric sets is designed to help reduce KPI proliferation, and help users identify semantic models they need to answer specif...
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