Power BI Weekly

Issue #175 - 20th September 2022

Plenty of announcements. Let's start with the Power BI September 2022 Feature Summary, where we've been told that the Hierarchical style axis is now the default display for multiple fields being used for the x axis, the automatic display names for summarized fields have been adapted to contain the summarization type, and it is now officially supported to consume datasets you have access to in external tenants within your own tenant (big news for partners/vendors/suppliers/any org that consumes Power BI content from multiple tenants!)

Elsewhere this week, we've been told about the new built-in capability within the query engine called “Horizontal Fusion,” a query performance optimization in Power BI and Analysis Services - long story short, queries will run faster (particularly in DirectQuery mode), and you don't have to do anything! Note that it's currently only in Premium, but it'll be arriving in Pro within a few months. We've also been told that the USERCULTURE DAX function now supported in Power BI Premium, there is now Power BI report and dataset management in Power Apps Solutions, and the On-premises data gateway August 2022 update is now available.

A few bits of content from our side this week: James Broome has published the second in his series on planning and delivering modern data analytics solutions, emphasizing the importance of focusing on the outputs, rather than the inputs, in the article successful data projects start by forgetting about the data, Barry Smart has recorded his session from Data Scotland 2022: Fake it 'til you make it - generating production quality test data at scale using Azure Synapse, and Jess Hill has written an article outlining the various Performance Optimisation Tools for Power BI.

I also wanted to highlight a couple of other blogs this week - one from Max Wikström talking about Power BI data types in relationships – Does it matter? (a bit of a grey area within Power BI data modeling), and Chris Webb has published another part in the Power BI + Power Automate series: Calling The Power BI Enhanced Refresh API From Power Automate, Part 6: Cancelling Dataset Refreshes (I was mistaken in last week's editorial when I said it was the last!)

Finally, I'll be attending Big Data LDN on Wednesday and Thursday, so please do reach out if you're attending and would like to catch-up!