SQLBits is upon us - I hope a good number of you have been fortunate enough to attend this year. If anyone reading this is attending, I'll be here all week, so please come and say hi.

Outside SQLBits, there's been a pretty significant announcement this week in the Power BI space, and that's the Upcoming Retirement of Power BI Premium P SKUs (for everyone apart from sovereign cloud customers). I can't say this is a huge surprise (what with the new Fabric SKUs) but it's something you should start planning for sooner rather than later.

Some other announcements this week include the On-premises data gateway March 2024 release, in which we've been told about the Service Principal (SPN) support for on-premises and VNET data gateways. We've also been given some Copilot Updates March 2024, containing some admin updates and the announcement of added support for Apps, allowing report consumers to interact with Copilot as they browse app artifacts.

Sticking on the Copilot theme, Chris Webb has written a helpful blog discussing How Much Does Copilot Cost In Microsoft Fabric?, pointing out how that's not actually the right question to ask. Alberto Ferrari has written the first SQLBI blog on visual calculations, introducing VISUAL SHAPE for visual calculations in Power BI. Finally, my colleague Paul has written a brilliant in-depth blog about How to Build Visually Appealing and User Friendly Navigation into Power BI.