Some amazing updates have landed this week, and not just from the new Power BI Desktop release. A feature I've highlighted a couple of times in the past is now out in public preview, and that's Hybrid Tables in Power BI Premium, enabling the possibility to have both Import and DirectQuery partitions within the same table. Not only does this provide you the capability to retrieve the latest data without having to refresh the model, but this also enables you to keep recent data in "hot" mode (i.e. import), and have historical data (e.g. > 12 months old) accessible via DirectQuery in a sort of "cold" mode. This is particularly useful for larger models. In fact, Teo Lachev has described this latter scenario in the blog: Power BI Hybrid Tables. Do check it out.

We've also been notified that Asynchronous refresh now available in Power BI for public preview (yay) and on-demand loading capabilities for large models is now available (yay again, but probably impacts fewer of you). There have also been some Power BI Data Protection December announcements, including the GA of both default and mandatory label policies.

Last, but by no means least, is the Power BI December 2021 Feature Summary, which includes a highly sought-after feature in Sparklines, fixes to some of the issues identified for the new format pane, and the GA of the Paginated Report Visual.