The Data Engine Room

 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...

 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 specif...

With how popular my thoughts after Fabcon EU's keynote, I thought I'd do the same with the announcements out of Ignite. Again, we follow the themes of AI everywhere- with announcements grouped into: AI-powered Data platform Open and AI-ready data Lake AI-enabled business users Mission-critical foundation On top of these themes, we're seeing the number of items without CI/CD support being reduced. Long overdue, but at least it's now being resolved - and will be gone by the end of the year. AI-powered data platform This grouping is all about providing data teams with the tools they need to do their jobs. SQL Databases First up, we have SQL databases as a new Fabric component - basically a SaaS version of the Azure SQL DB that has been used for years. At face value, it seems like it's a small change but actually when you think about it, this looks to be a shift from Fabric being a purely analytical platform to an analytical and operational platform. Especially when you...

As the year draws to a close, and with Ignite only a few weeks away, it comes a bit of a shock to get an October update. But don't let how small an update it is mean you miss something that was snuck out under the radar. Power BI Not much again on the Power BI front, really feels like we should start to expect no major announcements going forwards. Either that, or Microsoft are working on something big that's taking up all the Power BI resource.  Only time will tell. Saying that, one feature was hidden down in the data engineering space. That is you can now add notebooks to what used to be a Power BI app. It's going to need some thought on how we use this going forwards - a lot of users aren't going to want to run code, so bit of an edge case this one. Data Engineering The big update in this space is auto-binding on notebooks in deployment pipelines and with git integration is GA. This is huge (and yes it should have always done this, and yes the documentation has been ...

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...

  Less than an hour after this mornings keynote and I thought I'd put together some initial thoughts on what we heard at Fabcon this morning. After some initial fun with dancing robots, and introduction from the team at Guy In a Cube, it was time for Arun to take to the stake and open the keynote. As we've come to expect from Microsoft keynote's over the last 12 months, the key theme was that of AI. But critically recognising how crucial getting your data estate in line is to taking advantage of the new developments we're seeing in technology today. As all us data experts know, the quality of the insight the business will obtain is only as good as the quality of the data that underpins it. Typically referred to as garbage in / garbage out (GiGo). Combine this with the fragmentation in the technology landscape, and businesses struggle to solve the dual challenges of interopobility and Gigo. A challenge that Microsoft Fabric is trying to solve today. For those that aren...

Some of you will be familiar with dynamic row level security (DRLS) in PowerBI. For those that aren't, DRLS allows us to use the email address of the user that is logged into the service via their Entra account. With this email address, and corresponding email address in our semantic model, we can dynamically filter the semantic model to only show the data that user could see. The result, we can use one report suite to serve the same content to country, region, and global teams whilst simultaneously providing the necessary security around sensitive data. Now back in the world of Power BI, that was really easy. We fired up Power BI desktop, went into manage security roles, and added the necessary DAX: Now in Fabric, that still works exactly the same way as it always has for import and DirectQuery semantic models. However, it's not so straight forward for DirectLake semantic models. Why? The challenge is that a number of features break DirectLake connections and force the model b...