Power BI Weekly

Issue #191 - 24th January 2023

A flurry of exciting announcements this week. Firstly, we've been told about the Public Preview of Power BI Dataset Scale-Out which is the last big discrepancy between AAS and Power BI Premium, enabling dynamic scaling based on live query processing demands. It also enables the decoupling of refresh scenarios from live user queries, meaning that neither is affected by the load caused by the other. Sticking to compute improvements, we've been told about some backup and restore improvements for large datasets near the size limit, enabling backups near the dataset size limit to be restored more easily, through the addition of a new forceRestore option. Elsewhere, we've been told about the new Connected Excel Tables from Power BI feature in Public Preview, allowing us to generate "standard" Excel tables (i.e. not just PivotTables) connected to our Power BI data, which is a huge step towards making Power BI more accessible for all.

Moving on - and one for the admins out there - there have been some My workspace governance improvements released in Public Preview, which allows admins to assign themselves access to personal workspaces, as well the ability to lock personal workspaces to a specific capacity (which may be required for data residence reasons). Another feature that's landed is the ability to Embed your Power BI organizational apps in Microsoft Teams Channels and Meetings. You read it right - actual Power BI Apps embedded within Teams, rather than just content from workspaces. So that's pretty cool. And finally, last (and probably least), we've been told about the On-premises data gateway December release - no updates here, other than compatibility with the latest version of Power BI Desktop.