Power BI Weekly

Issue #233 - 14th November 2023

This week the ground-breaking news is that Datasets have been renamed to semantic models. I should think this decision will divide opinion. From the Fabric perspective, this makes total sense. There are too many artifacts that resemble "datasets" in Fabric such that the term could add an annoying level of ambiguity (especially for newcomers). Conversely, looking at Power BI in isolation, "datasets" are a well-defined artifact type and can't be confused as easily with other artifacts. "Dataset" is also a well-known and understood term. "Semantic model" is less well understood as a term, but I do think it more accurately describes the role of the data model + measures in Power BI. Anyway, it will be interesting to see how the community reacts to this one!

There has been one other announcement this week, and that's the On-premises data gateway November 2023 release, which includes a new tenant registration allowlist setting which you can use to control which tenants are allowed to register the on-premises data gateway application. The final article I'd like to highlight this week has been written by my colleague Barry who has written about why Star Schemas are fundamental to unleashing value from data in Power BI and Microsoft Fabric, focusing on the business and end-user implications/justifications rather than solely the technical, and discussing where in the data pipeline lifecycle the star schema should be generated. Do have a read!