Power BI Weekly

Issue #247 - 27th February 2024

A flurry of announcements came shortly after last week's edition, and it's not really stopped since. First and foremost, we were provided with the Power BI February 2024 Feature Summary which contained some huge announcements. The most significant being that of Visual calculations (preview), a new way of writing DAX formulas that are scoped to a visual and make common calculations (such as cumulative sums/rolling averages) much simpler. A number of people have written about it this week, so I suggest you check them out. The next significant update (which also warranted its own blog post) is that of TMDL in Power BI Desktop developer mode (Preview), which, if enabled, replaces TMSL as the file format/syntax representing your semantic model definition when utilizing .pbip (Power BI Project) files. This is another huge step towards making Power BI Desktop files more accessible and extensible from a scripting perspective.

Aside from the Feature Summary this week, we've been told about the general availability of granular access control for all data connection types (a security feature that automatically disconnects models from their sources if modified by a user without the correct access), and Leveraging pure Direct Lake mode for maximum query performance (which offers a new "DirectLakeOnly" mode which forces Direct Lake to always be used rather than falling back to DirectQuery). The rest of the updates are:

• Additional enhancements for columns, bars and ribbons
• Introducing Public Preview Copilot for Power BI chat-based capabilities: summarize, inquire, analyze
• Improvements to Power BI apps, an increase in audiences and access control for hidden content
• Announcing the deprecation of creation of machine learning models in Power BI using Dataflows V1
• dataCoverageDefinition: A New Optimisation For Hybrid Tables In Power BI

I told you there were lots!

Finally, it's exactly 3 weeks until SQLBits kicks off, and my colleague Barry and I are conducting a workshop on the Tuesday all about DataOps: How to Deliver Data Faster and Better with Microsoft Cloud in which we'll be sharing patterns and practices we've been refining over many years of building reliable and effective modern data platforms of all shapes and sizes. Hope to see you there!