The Data Engine Room

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...

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...

 Just when I thought the product team might be slowing down for year end and the summer break, they've only gone against my expectations and not only dropped a July feature - but a couple of updates since. Given this one wasn't expected, I'm not going to be able to do my usual breakdown of what is GA and what's not - but I'll try to call it out as we go along. Up first we've got a fairly major update to the Spark compute - one that changes the billing approach Autoscale billing for spark (GA - Generally Available) For those that haven't seen it, this is a pretty big shift in the way that the spark compute is billed. Most of you are probably familiar with the SKU based approach that Fabric follows - that is that you bay for a particular license level and you get a number of compute units (think of it as credits) to spend on the activities you do in Fabric. The idea being that it gets around the difficulty of budgeting for the CFO that consumption based proces...

Last up in this month series is a review of the preview features we're seeing drop into both Fabric and Power BI. As always, do remember that it is not recommended to use preview features in production unless absolutely necessary. By using them in production you are carrying the risk of breaking changes, and without SLA level support. First up, Power BI. Power BI Visual calculation updates This month we've seen: Parameter pickers for required parameters when a function template is used. Coloured highlights similar to the way that Excel works. Change in behaviour when using columns in a function so that a value instead of an error is returned. Added visual calculations to the explore view. For me, the largest update in this change is adding the visual calculation option to the explore view. This feature will make it easier to allow train of thought analysis to move into areas not natively supported in the semantic model. Whilst the coloured highlights are welcome, my concern is ...

 As we head into July, we get what is likely to be our last major update until Fabcon Vienna. With holiday season and Microsoft's end of financial year, we don't typically see July and August releases, and I wouldn't expect any different this year. For those new to the blog, I post three separate blogs covering Fabric GA features, Power BI GA features, and preview features both combined. This one looks at the release notes that aren't clearly preview (though don't expect massive changes this month as we head into what are typically quieter times for Microsoft). First up is data engineering. Data engineering Notebook version history On the surface this one seems a minor change, but actually it's a massively handy feature. At one time or another, pretty much everyone makes a change that they need to undo but they haven't committed changes to version control as it's code they're still working on and isn't ready for a commit. Until now that meant, in...

As announcement season comes to an end, we can look at how this weeks big announcements from Databricks line up with Fabric and the roadmap we know about today. Before going into the features from each, it's clear that we are going to have a big tussel between the two. I'll start with the announcements from data + AI summit and then look at any features the Fabric team have announced that wasn't covered. Databricks Data + AI summit Lakebase First up, we have operational databases. Bringing operational systems into the same platforms as insight and analytics is proving to be a big theme currently. One that will simplify solutions, and reduce both data movement and data duplication. Big win for not only customers, but also the sustainability of our data solutions. Databricks offering is Lakebase, a Postgres solution underpinned by Databricks storage platform. Over in Fabric, Microsoft has announced Cosmos DB as the equivalent. Which of these is better is going to be very much...

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...

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 (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...

After last nights keynote, we've so many announcements and new features to digest that it's going to take a few blog posts to get through everything. Given that I'm going to split the announcements to cover: Keynote, Power BI, Fabric, Purview, and preview features. Let's get started. For this blog, if you have a specific feature you want to know more about do have a look at Arun's blog.  Unless it's a really major preview announcement, I'm going to focus on features that have gone GA - the reason, without doing a risk/reward evaluation, I personaly take the view that preview features shouldn't be used in production. That means for the majority, the preview features need to be considered in future roadmap plans but are unlikely to be used today. Up first, copilot. Co-pilot The big announcement in this space is that Copilot is now available at all SKU levels! This is a big one for the SME sector that couldn't justify the cost of an F64 SKU. Now you too...

Firstly, sorry this one's late. Life's been busy and only just getting back up to speed with what I'm now allowed to talk about. Looking back at what was announced in Feb, we start with Power BI Power BI The real major news is that the 32bit version of Power BI desktop will go out of suppot on 2025-06-30. If you are still using this, you need to upgrade to the 64 bit version asap. Other than that, a couple of copilot features have been added to add tablet support to the mobile app and to open the black box on how copilot has found insight. The second of these is a big one, being able to understand the data, measures, and filters that copilot has used is a massive step forwards in increasing confidence in results. Combine this with the new explore this visual option, copilot is getting more and more powerful. Fabric platform This month we see improvements to goverment of the estate within Fabric. Whilst it isn't to the same level as Purview is/will be (e.g. No DQ reports...

 And we're back. After Microsoft's traditional extended xmas shutdown, it's time to roundup the key features Microsoft released in January. Grab a cupa, and get ready for what promises to be a fairly lengthy post. First up, Power BI. Power BI For the lucky few with an F64 SKU, the new 'answer a question about the data' feature should have just landed for copilot in Power BI. With the ability to personalise these using the Q&A features in Power Bi desktop, they have real promise to help the C-Suite reliably answer regular questions without needing an analyst. As with all things copilot, do thoroughly test for hallucinations before letting it lose with end users. Whilst Microsoft have done a good job of reducing them, the tech isn't perfect yet. Next up, explore this data (preview feature). This allows us to take a visual in a report as the starting point for train of thought analysis. By clicking on the three dots a new window pops up alowing data to be added...