What's new in the Power BI and Fabric world? (March 2024)

New month, new releases...

A new milestone has probably been reached for #PowerBI and #Fabric services.

Let's start with #PowerBI updates (the ones that caught my attention and interest at least ??) :

1/ On-Object Interaction Updates : A new mixed experience between the old way and the new On-object spirit. The community's feedback has clearly been taken into account by the #PowerBI team and it's really good ! This update offers a more flexible On-object experience that will certainly satisfy nostalgic peopleto maintain their work habits and, at the same time, enjoy the advantages and benefits of On-object interaction.

2/ <Preview> Mobile layout auto-create : It was a true mess ! Not easy to use, time consuming, ... Now, we can focus on creating a report for a "classic" view and are able to automatically generate a mobile layout with a single clic :

3/ <Preview> Deliver report subscriptions to OneDrive SharePoint : A classic "Standard" subscription was intented to be delivered by mail only. Now the exported file (PDF, PowerPoint, ...) can be pushed to a OneDrive space or a SharePoint site which will open up new possibilities... This Preview needs a Premium (aka Fabric) Capacity !

4/ <Preview> Connect to new data sources from Power BI Report Builder : Who said paginated reports were dead? In some cases, they remain very useful. The #PowerBI Team therefore had the clever idea of enriching Report Builder with Power Query and M experiences in order to facilitate the connection to certain useful data sources like #Snowflake, #Databricks, etc. And no need to prepare the data in a separate service because Power BI Report Builder has its own “Get Data” option :

Let's continue with the #Fabric updates (the ones that kept my attention and interest at least ??) :

1/ <Preview> Folder in Workspace : A long-awaited update is finally here! A dream that I wanted to achieve since the beginning of the #PowerBI era. The possibility of reorganizing the artifacts in different technical (deployment stages, git folders, etc.) or operational (subjects, projects, teams, etc.) ways is finally possible. No more navigating or scrolling down or using the search pane to find the information you want. You can now organize your #Fabric (and not just #PowerBI) items in your Workspace into one or more folders and up to 10 subfolders! Folders are also supported in Deployment pipelines. Its permissions model remains basic and I expect future improvements to strengthen security strategies:

2/ <Preview> Integrating On-Premises Data into Microsoft Fabric Using Data Pipelines in Data Factory : Are you still working with on-premises data sources (like SQL Server, ...)? Until now, it was not possible to get data via Data Factory (Data pipelines, Dataflow Gen 2). But now you can use your on-premises data gateway to get data from your on-premises data source (like you currently do in #PowerBI for example) without needing to use an additional service in your data platform. A real #Fabric advantage !

3/ <Preview> Mirroring in Microsoft Fabric : When you have so many databases on different platforms and want to combine their data in your reports... So many ETL/ELT pipelines, time-consuming, data silos,... With the mirroring capability, your data will be replicated in real time in OneLake (an initial snapshot then a continuous CDC will occur), you can easily combine them and benefit from all the advantages of the powerful Direct Lake in your #PowerBI reports! Please note that “Mirroring storage (based on the capacity size) and compute cost is free. [...] OneLake storage is billed only when the free Mirroring storage limit is exceeded, or the capacity is paused. ?

Of course, all these new features still need to be tested to confirm the effectiveness and discover the true limitations behind the words but I really look for such updates with each release because they are echoes of what we hear daily from our customers. ... So, a big kudos to the #Fabric and #PowerBI Teams!