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...

 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...

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...

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...

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...

 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...

As we move forwards, I'm going to take a look at the monthly release notes and discuss the good, the bad, and the ugly.  First up: Power BI Desktop https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/power-bi-september-2024-feature-summary/ First up, dark mode: Image from Microsoft's release notes Doesn't really need much explanation - apart from, about time! Only other major changes for desktop are a few formatting tweaks that, whilst are still in preview, are now turned on by default. Personally, I'd leave them on and roll with it. Next, is how the interaction between Teams and Power BI works when MFA is enabled. This one had the potential to have been a right pain, but thankfully it only needs to be done once it seems. For me, the biggest announcement is the live edit of semantic models running in Direct Lake mode from Power BI desktop. Up until now BI dev's working on a Direct Lake semantic model have had to work completely in the service - and I know this has annoyed a lo...