Power BI Weekly

Issue #315 - 8th July 2025

A very small edition this week, but Copilot news has come to save the day. There have been several Updates to Copilot in Power BI: More ways to see, learn from, and ask about your report data, with the ability to ask data questions to your reports in "chat with your data" experience and the ability to ask ranking questions over your data. On the same topic this week, Chris Webb and Dan English have written about how you can piggy-back off AI instructions to achieve certain behaviours in Copilot: Chris has shown how you can use them to Prevent The Use Of Implicit Measures (which you may or may not agree with!), and Dan has shown how to use AI instructions to provide non-English language responses.

Also this week, I'd like to highlight a new blog series my colleague Barry has shared, all about DuckLake. You've probably heard about DuckDB - a high-performance analytical SQL engine over files and databases. However, it was not a Lakehouse format (or catalog) in and of itself, unlike what we get in a Synapse/Fabric Lakehouse which use a combination of Delta tables and a Hive metastore. Instead, DuckLake is a new integrated data lake and catalog format working over existing SQL Database Engines that is designed to provide enhanced performance and flexibility over existing Lakehouse+Catalog architectures. Very exciting - do check out Barry's blogs for more!