Power BI Weekly

Issue #148 - 15th March 2022

It was great to see many of you at SQLBits last week. Thank you to the organizers, volunteers and speakers for such a seamless and high-quality event from start to finish. For those of you that didn't attend and were wondering whether there were any "announcements" - not really (at least not that I know of). There was a focus on goals in one of the sessions and the fact that they're now available for Pro (which you may remember actually happened towards the end of last year). There was talk around the further investment in the Teams + Power BI integration, and that Power BI Desktop will eventually become one of the "core" apps shipped with Office. There were hints around native version control & concurrent editing of PBIX files (but I predict that it will be quite some time before we see either of these things). On the Ops side, we were told about improvements to Data Gateway monitoring, with pre-built apps to help admins govern their gateways. I'll dig through my notes and see if there were any other "upcoming features" that haven't been explicitly mentioned on the official channels, but I think they were the main ones. And remember that you can always check the Power Platform release notes to see what the documented roadmap is.

Back to this week's edition: there was one official announcement, and that's that Dataset backup and restore performance just got a lot better, with huge speed improvements for both types of operations. Elsewhere, Ben Gribaudo has written about Custom Data Connectors and You, describing how you may benefit from creating custom connectors for some of your data sources. Bernat Agulló has come up with a clever way to Showing measure descriptions in tooltips, hooking up to the model's metadata via the XMLA endpoint, and Ruth Pozuelo Martinez has described how to Create elegant lists using DAX and the smart narrative visual in Power BI.