January 2026 - Power BI and Fabric update

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 And we're back. Another year, and not long till Fabcon in the US.

This month we've seen both Power BI and Fabric updates with some pretty important announcements.

Power BI

Under the general section the big one is a couple of deprications. If they impact you make a note of the dates and remember to stop using them before then.

  1. Q&A visual in Power BI - Depricated December 2026 to be replaced with Copilot
  2. SSRS Sharepoint Webpart - Depricated 13th April 2026

Copilot

Labeled as Copilot and AI in the release notes, but this is all copilot. It's a shame that those of us working in UK data centres can't enable Copilot without accepting the edge case risk of the data going to the US.

Mobile App update

For the mobile app, this months update is significant but minor. Ultimately it lets you restrict Copilots knowledge to a specific report or semantic model.

Approved for Copilot

In the service we're effectively getting an extension of the certified feater for semantic models. By marking a model as approved for copilot, it makes it easier for your report consumers to find the models they should be using.

Home Page updates

The home page has been updated to add a Copilot chat window front and centre. No more having to explicitly go and select Copilot from the menu list on the left.

Reporting

Persisted hierarchy level for field parameters

When field parameters went live last year, changing the value would automatically collapse hierarchies. This behaviour can now be over-ridden so the hierarchy expansion is maintained when the parameters value changes.

Format Pane Improvements

This month has seen changes to the colour picker and the granularity of resetting visual settings.

Markers in Azure Maps

You can now customize the shape markers to use:
  • Icons/custom images
  • Dynamic scaling
  • Custom colours and transparency
  • Icons for each category

Modern visual tool tips

The new style of tool tips has gone GA. Adding:
  • Drill down/through
  • Custom themes

Tables and Matrices column sizing

The new auto-size width option is set to Fit to content by default - meaning that you won't end up with unnecessarily wide columns. The Grow to Fit option instead has to be selected by choice.

Modeling

Incremental models edited in Service

Editing incremental models is now supported in the service. This has limitations and doesn't change the behaviour of not being able to download these models for Power BI desktop.

Chinese coded character set support

China's GB18030-2022 standard is now supported in Power BI.

Developers & API's

PBIR as default format

This is really the big announcement this month. By PBIR (Power BI enhanced report format) being the default it solves all the issues we've previously had with git management and PowerBI reports.

I've lost track of how painful this been over the years, so it's an absolutely brilliant news that this is now happening.

Fabric

General

Microsoft acquires Osmos 

For those that missed this one, it's a pretty major announcements. Osmos was an agentic AI powered data engineering platform that you could add as a 3rd party workload.

That is no longer available and instead the technology will become a native part of the platform. What this means for the future, we've yet to see. But it certainly has a lot of potential if done correctly.

Platform

AI Auto-Summary for semantic models (Preview)

To get access to this feature, it means you have to have Copilot enabled in the capacity and grant permissions for the feature. With that done, Copilot will crawl the model and automatically create a human readable description to go into OneLake catalogue explorer.

Parent child hierarchy in OneLake Catalog

Linked items are automatically grouped - for example, KQL DBs automatically appear under the associated Eventhouse.

Item Reference Variable Type (Preview)

Instead of using GUIDs to provide references to items in Fabric within variable libraries, that can now be done via item name. Note that you will only have access to items that you have been granted at least read permission on.

Git integration improvements

Couple of updates for those using GitHub:
  • Support for GitHub Enterprise Cloud with data residency
  • Commit to new branch is now available. Meaning if you forget before you start work it makes life easier.

Python SDK for rest APIs (Preview)

You can get a Python SDK on PyPi for executing Fabric tasks via the public APIs.

OneLake security support for Mirrored databases (Preview)

In a step forward to the new security model going GA, we now have support for Mirrored databases.

Data Engineering

Lakehouse high concurrency mode

New mode that optimises the Spark resources for tasks like Load to table and preview. Enabling this new mode meas that a user can run up to five independent Spark jobs within a single spark session.

Fabric connection inside Notebook (Preview)

Allows you to add connections to sources such as Azure blob store, Key Vault, etc. Making it much easier to interact with these objects within the notebook.

This one can't go GA quick enough for me!

Open and edit workspace's Notebook inside VS Code

Instead of downloading the Notebook first, now you can connect from within VS code.

Materialised lake view enhancements

We now get the following with materialised lake view:
  • Support for create or replace syntax
  • Lineage to show the notebook that created the view

Data Warehouse

Proactive statistics refresh

Instead of having to manually maintain statistics, these can be automatically updated by enabling this feature.

Incremental statistics refresh

Only eligible for tables with mostly insert or add operations (basically insert only models), the system now appends the data onto the table statistics instead of having to rebuild the statistics completely.

Result set caching

This one is now GA. Pretty much does what it says on the tin.

Merge

The MERGE statement now has GA support in Fabric Warehouses. For me this was pretty much a must before even starting to look at using them. Whilst you can work around not having it, it's an absolute pain to not.

Real-time intelligence (RTI)

New connectors

This month we've seen two new connectors:
  • MQTT v3 support for MQTT connector
  • Azure maps weather service (GA)

Eventhouse accelerated queries

This month we had several new features to accelerate Eventhouse queries
  1. Onelake shortcuts support acceleration based on datetime columns
  2. OneLake shorts controlling data freshness latency using the MaxAge property
  3. Copilot support for querying shortcuts in Eventhouse

Data Factory

Copy job connectors

We had 11 new connectors added. Make sure you check out the blog if this is a feature you use regularly.

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