The Data Engine Room

With the GA features and key build announcements out the way, we now turn our attention to the preview features. Again, I'm not going to cover the key announcements from build in this blog - if you are interested in those, do go have a look at my previous blog on the matter. First up, Power BI. Power BI Copilot and AI As with all things Copilot, for UK readers, please do remember you have to turn on out of region processing - and risk your data being processed in the US. For everyone else in the EU, this isn't an issue (your data is processed in Paris).  AI data schema Part of the challenge we're going to face with Copilot of semantic models is doing all we can to ensure the semantic models they are using are optimised - to help reduce the chances of hallucinations further. AI data schema is one of the tools to do this. With this wizard we are able to: Simplify the schema by disabling tables, columns, measures, and hierarchies. Reducing the data set that Copilot can see. Es...

Alongside all the key announcements from build, we've had this months may update drop. In this blog, I'm going to focus on the features that have gone GA and aren't covered by my keynote announcement. I'll also drop a separate post for all the features that are still in preview. As always, please do double check that a feature you want to use is definately GA (the Microsoft blog's aren't always clear). Before we start on features, the first announcement is the new Fabric roadmap . Personally, I like the fact we can now see which quarter features are due to go GA - it's a big improvement. Slight grumble on how sparse the GA plans are, but hopefully that's because it's a new tool and we'll start to see more announcements going forwards. Up first, platform changes. Platform New rest APIs and service principal (SPN) support This month we now get a bunch of new APIs to make sure that we're nearly at feature parity with Power BI (only the admin API...

As we hit the May release notes, we again focus on the GA features for Power BI. As we're in a build month, I won't be covering anything from the big build announcements (those are in a seperate blog) nor any preview features (again a seperate blog as normal). Again, as always, sometimes it isn't clear if a new feature is actually in preview from the release notes (e.g. this months TMDL changes are associated with a preview feature but not labeled as preview in the blog).  Please do double check before you use these features in production. First up, is the reminder that as of August 2025 the 32 bit version of Power BI desktop will be depricated. If you are still running it today, then do upgrade to the 64 bit version asap. Copilot and AI Updates to language layer for understanding data questions This month we've had improvements for improvements of how relative dates are handled - as well as something called 'generation of proper filters'. Not sure what that las...

The first in the series looks at the key announcements that came out of build on the 15th May. This doesn't include anything covered by the monthly build announcement (stay tuned for further blogs on those across Fabric and Power BI). All of this and more is covered off in the new Fabric Roadmap. At a high level, I'd say overall build left me feeling a bit flat in terms of Fabric announcements. Don't get me wrong, a lot of the preview features below are great. But that's the problem, it's only preview - and honestly I can't recommend using them in production whilst that's the case. We've actually had very few GA announcements. Whilst some might say at least it shows the investment in the platform, my argument is that without knowing when those features will GA, most people don't really care about them.  That's a long winded way of saying we need Microsoft to provide an SLA between features coming into preview and going GA. That will make it much ...

As we go into May, last months update list has landed and it's time to go through what's new and what's worth knowing about. Given the volume of updates we're getting now, I'm going to keep splitting out my thoughts into: Fabric GA Features Power BI GA features  Fabric and Power BI Public preview features (This blog) With all things in public preview, don't forget the general rule of thumb is to not use these in production. Sometimes you have to, but do so at your own risk. Otherwise it's worth keeping an eye on to help shape roadmaps. First up, Power BI. Power BI  Modelling Live edit of Direct Lake semantic models in Power BI desktop Currently BI devs need to build and maintain direct lake semantic models within the service. This update allows them to go back to using the more familiar approach of using PBI desktop.  For those already using this feature, checkout the PBI blog for what the changes are. Personally, this is a feature I might consider turning o...

As we go into May, last months update list has landed and it's time to go through what's new and what's worth knowing about. Given the volume of updates we're getting now, I'm going to keep splitting out my thoughts into: Fabric GA Features Power BI GA features (This blog) Fabric and Power BI Public preview features First up, general updates. General If you are using the Q&A feature, be aware that once you upgrade desktop to the April '25 release the report will no longer be backwards compatible. All dev's will need to move to the April desktop release to be able to open the PBIX. Copilot and AI With all things Copilot, this comes with a sanity warning that if you are in the UK and enable the out of region access, then you open up a risk that data could be sent to the US. Please see my Fabric GA feature post this month for more info. Adhoc calculation support in read mode Previously if you wanted to create an adhoc calculation to support Copilot threads,...

As we go into May, last months update list has landed and it's time to go through what's new and what's worth knowing about. Given the volume of updates we're getting now, I'm going to keep splitting out my thoughts into: Fabric GA Features (This blog) Power BI GA features Fabric and Power BI Public preview features First up, general updates. General The big news this month is the removal of the F64 requirement to get access to Copilot. I know a lot of people have been asking about this and Microsoft have delivered. For those in the UK, please do remember that enabling Copilot means allowing out of region data transfers to be able to get the payloads to the Paris DC for OpenAI processing. I know it's ridiculous, but as far as I can work it out it's another Brexit "benefit". The risk you are taking on by doing this is that data could be sent to the US in some rare scenarios ( confirmed by Microsoft ). Hopefully we'll get some GPU capacity in the...