Power BI Weekly

Issue #357 - 12th May 2026

A couple of official announcements from the Power BI team this week, both in preview and both written up by Kay Unkroth. The first is a redesigned semantic model settings pane, which has been updated to align with the modern Fabric look and feel (it's purely a cosmetic refresh more than a functional overhaul). The second is rather more interesting for developers: a new and improved Execute DAX Queries REST API that allows you to run DAX queries against semantic models programmatically and receive results back in Apache Arrow IPC format. It is the same API that already powers DAX Query View in Power BI Desktop and the service, so it is now being opened up for external integration. Worth a look if you have any tooling or automation built around your semantic models.

On the community side, there is a practical piece on load testing semantic models over on the Fabric Community Blog. As some of you may know, load testing Power BI has historically been quite awkward, so it is good to see an alternative way to tackle it. See the article (and code) written by Tharun Kumar: Power BI load-testing notebook that won Microsoft Fabric Semantic Link Developer Challenge 2026.

Finally, Jon Stjernegaard Vöge has written thoughtful piece on where Conversational BI sits right now, discussing the fact that that the pace of change in tools and approaches should be expected and embraced. Jon isn't pushing specific technologies, rather laying out five foundational investments that should hold their value regardless of which platform wins out. A very interesting read for those interested in the Conversational BI space.