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 specific questions. This one looks like a promising feature. I hope Microsoft adds functionality such as identifying when a KPI is used across multiple models and being able to alert when the definitions are sufficiently different. It's definitely a feature I'll be keeping an eye on.

TMDL format for Git Integration

Fabric semantic models are now moving from JSON to Tabular Model Scripting Language (TMSL) when git integration is enabled. At last, we have the ability to branch and merge in PowerBI theoretically (and a reason to start learning TMDL and TMSL).

Definitely one to play with more and see how far we can push merging multiple branches before the model breaks.


Platform

Tenant switching

We can now switch across tenants. Definitely one for the consultants out there, but a very welcome feature.

Source control branch switching

Another one that's a welcome change. Having to previously destroy and re-create workspaces was a bit of a pain.

OneLake

External data sharing

This has been a bit of a headache for those running multiple tenants. Great to see an out the box solution.

Data engineering

Fabric API for GraphQL now GA

For those that need to expose data in Fabric out to external systems over API, this will be the default approach going forwards. It's going to save a lot of effort for a lot of teams.


ArchGIS (Preview)
For those doing Geospatial analysis, this is a great announcement. Nothing formal on pricing, but I'm hearing it'll be free during preview and then use ESRIs token based system for billing purposes.

Data Factory

Table and partition refreshes on semantic models
This is brilliant functionality. I'm sure loads of devs will be glad to see this feature.



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