Power BI Weekly

Issue #286 - 26th November 2024

If this were a Fabric newsletter, it would be a huge edition. But since it's not, it's not. However, I would like to highlight some of the Fabric announcements most relevant to Power BI. First of all, we have the Upcoming Changes to the Fabric Navigation Experience, which removes the granular persona/workload based experience we currently have, in favour of a simplified two-experience model: Fabric, or Power BI. This, in my humble opinion, is a welcome change, as it was often confusing navigating around the various experiences and wondering why you couldn't see certain artifact types at certain points. It's not entirely clear when these updates are going to be rolled out. Moving on, a huge announcement is that the announcement of SQL database in Microsoft Fabric Public Preview, bringing operational workloads directly into Fabric (and therefore OneLake). Some of you are probably thinking "great - yet another SQL DB offering", which I can totally appreciate. MSFT has provided a Azure SQL DB vs Fabric SQL DB Feature comparison and SQL DB Decision Guide to try to help you understand the differences and decision points. However, this new Database offering does open up some exciting new capabilities that will be easier than ever to implement, such as Native Power BI write-back as shown in the demo in that video - do check it out.

Other Fabric announcements from Ignite relevant to Power BI are:

• Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention policies now support the restrict access action for semantic models
• Introducing the new OneLake catalog: Your central hub for data discovery, management, and governance
• Announcing the Availability of REST APIs for Connections and Gateways in Microsoft Fabric
• Announcing preview of Workspace Monitoring

And if you'd like to read the rest of the Fabric announcements at Ignite, see the "Analytics" section over in Azure Weekly's latest edition. You'll also find the wider Ignite announcements across the rest of the Azure ecosystem there.

Directly on the Power BI blog, we've also been provided with a more detailed article Introducing org apps, now in preview – multiple apps per workspace, custom colors, and more!, which was part of a Fabric Feature summary a couple of months ago. Take a read of this to understand the new capabilities in the new "org app" experience and what's being worked on. Looking very promising!