The Data Engine Room

This month, I'm going to go back to a single blog with all features. Unfortunately trying to produce separate blogs each month is proving too much work. Grab a cup of tea, and get comfortable, with everything from Ignite this will be a long one. First up, Power BI. Power BI Copilot and AI Ask anything with standalone Copilot updates and availability in Power BI mobile (Preview) This is the new Copilot interface from the service brought into the mobile app. I still haven't had chance to get hands on with this experience, but it is the single biggest shift that I've seen in the Power BI side for years. I know many a c-suite that will be excited by this, especially now it can be used on the move between meetings. Improvements to verified answers It might seem a small one, but moving from the filter context at time of creation to filter context at the time of consumption is a big step forwards. Add to that Copilot getting better at matching user prompts to verified answers unde...

This month's releases are, thankfully, a lot smaller than previous months. Without further adu, it's time to press on with looking at the GA features. Fabric Platform updates UI/UX improvements This month we have a couple of minor changes to make life easier. These are: keyboard shortcut support for horizontal tabs and object explorer Focus mode to maximise editing space These sorts of improvements are always welcome, but Microsoft do need to make sure they rollout features quicker - for example my Sandbox enviroment doesn't have the hoizontal tabs still. Outbound Access Protection for Spark This is one of the big announcements  this month for me. For those that don't know what outbound access protection is, it ultimately allows security and governance teams to put rules in place that control the destinations data can be sent to from a workspace. Whilst we have had this function in the platform for a while, Lakehouses haven't been included in the supported list. Giv...

 This is part two in the series of all of the September announcements for both fabric and power bi. For those that haven't read it please go and have a look at part one on the following link . This parts starts with the announcements around real-time intelligence. I'm not going to touch on the maps feature that was part of the keynotes, please go and see that separate blog for any of those announcements. Fabric continued. Azure monitor diagnostic logs integration via event stream With this new feature, we can now bring metrics and logs from as your Azure sources into fabric event streams. Creating a single location for advanced analytics on monitor diagnostic logs data. Private link support for event stream at Workspace level For a limited number of sources and destinations, we can now use private links at a Workspace level. If you need to use this level of security please do go and check the documentation. External parameter support for dataflow Gen 2 Relatively small update, ...

This month I thought I'd combine the Fabric release notes along with the Power BI release notes to give you a full view of what has been announced in the September releases.  This blog will cover features that have gone GA and for preview features there will be a separate blog to follow.  First up Fabric.  Fabric  General platform announcements The first section in this month's blog covers the general announcements about the platform. Multitasking UI updates Microsoft have put this one further down there release now it's however I'm gonna push it right to the top. The reason for that is though this particular feature is in preview, a lot of you will have already seen the changes that it has brought into the user interface. For example, we will start to see tabs across the top for Soda every time you open a new fabric object you get a new tab that is color coded based upon the Workspace that object is in. That's the most noticeable change from most developers and one...

About a year ago I wrote a blog on workspace topology . Since then, I have spoken to a number of customers and engineers at various meetups on capacities and the challenges they can present.  From those conversations, I've come to realise that a follow on is needed to to help demystify capacity management. For those that haven't read the previous blog, I clearly called out:   In this blog, I'm going to explain why this is the case and how you should go about managing workspace creation. The dangers of creating workspaces without planning Whilst Fabric makes it really easy to standup a new workspace on an existing capacity through the UI, a number of reasons exist today as to why we shouldn't be doing this. Financial management To understand the dangers of workspace creation, we need to first review the ways that Fabric items can be billed: Consumption unit (CU) purchased via SKU with Burst and Smooth functionality enabled (Default). This is the approach we're all us...

As the biggest European Fabric conference of the year kicks off in Vienna today we've had a number of key announcements that have been made this morning. Sadly I wasn't able to make this years as I chose to move jobs, but will push for next - it was the highlight of the year last year and have definately missed it this year. This blog covers all you need to know from this morning, as well as my thoughts. Graph databases As the digital twin functionality hinted at, we now get graph databases as a native object in Fabric. The unique power this brings is that data doesn't need to be duplicated into a new object to create these databases - unlike the likes of Neo4j, TigerGraph, etc. Beyond a couple of specific uses cases (e.g. supply chain analysis, manufacturing lines, tracking data for SAR requests, etc), I've always felt that these are a solution looking for a problem. But now that we have agentic systems, they add a whole load of context that traditional row or columner...