The Data Engine Room

 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...

With how popular my thoughts after Fabcon EU's keynote, I thought I'd do the same with the announcements out of Ignite. Again, we follow the themes of AI everywhere- with announcements grouped into: AI-powered Data platform Open and AI-ready data Lake AI-enabled business users Mission-critical foundation On top of these themes, we're seeing the number of items without CI/CD support being reduced. Long overdue, but at least it's now being resolved - and will be gone by the end of the year. AI-powered data platform This grouping is all about providing data teams with the tools they need to do their jobs. SQL Databases First up, we have SQL databases as a new Fabric component - basically a SaaS version of the Azure SQL DB that has been used for years. At face value, it seems like it's a small change but actually when you think about it, this looks to be a shift from Fabric being a purely analytical platform to an analytical and operational platform. Especially when you...

As the year draws to a close, and with Ignite only a few weeks away, it comes a bit of a shock to get an October update. But don't let how small an update it is mean you miss something that was snuck out under the radar. Power BI Not much again on the Power BI front, really feels like we should start to expect no major announcements going forwards. Either that, or Microsoft are working on something big that's taking up all the Power BI resource.  Only time will tell. Saying that, one feature was hidden down in the data engineering space. That is you can now add notebooks to what used to be a Power BI app. It's going to need some thought on how we use this going forwards - a lot of users aren't going to want to run code, so bit of an edge case this one. Data Engineering The big update in this space is auto-binding on notebooks in deployment pipelines and with git integration is GA. This is huge (and yes it should have always done this, and yes the documentation has been ...