It's a festive time for many of you reading this newsletter, but whether or not you celebrate Christmas, the last week has certainly been a period of gift-giving from the Power BI team. You've probably heard that DirectQuery for Power BI datasets and Azure Analysis Services is now in preview, which enables users to connect to existing Power BI/Analysis Services models in the cloud, and extend those with their own local models. This is a huge deal, as it bridges the gap between self-service and enterprise BI. Such a huge deal that Marco and Alberto from the SQLBI team have both written and spoken about it - it's worthwhile taking a look at their content here: New composite models in Power BI: A milestone in Business Intelligence.

That was just one of the many exciting announcements this week. Another particularly noteworthy announcement stemming from the rather exciting Power BI December 2020 Feature Summary was that of the Small Multiples visual which is now in preview - a long awaited feature that will undoubtedly simplify (and improve the performance of) many of your reports. We've also been told that the Anomaly detection capabilities are now supported in Power BI Mobile apps, allowing users to drill into the insights discovered by anomaly detection feature while scrolling thorough their mobile reports. Finally, there's a new Dataflows Power Automate Connector in public preview providing a no-code method to track the status of Dataflow refreshes, and take action on their outcome (like refresh a downstream dataset). Very cool.

This edition marks the last one of 2020 - I'll be taking a break over the holiday period here in the UK. For those that celebrating Christmas - have a wonderful festive period. Otherwise, many happy returns to everyone for the new year, and you'll hear from me again on the 5th January.