Both Azure DevOps and GitHub are supported Git hosts for Power BI and Fabric workspace integration. I will demonstrate using ..read more

For the business intelligence professional, DevOps can be a confusing topic because it intersects with many disciplines and philosophies. I'm hopeful that a bit of reflection on my own experience over the years provides some valuable insight. I have seen DevOps and version control implemented on dozens and perhaps hundreds of projects, with different degrees of sophistication and control. If you work in a software development environment where DevOps is practiced as part of your team's development culture, you know that DevOps truly is a holistic methodology, including practices can be very ex ..read more

The term "architecture" is more commonly used in the realm of data engineering and data warehouse project work, but the concept applies to BI and analytic reporting projects of all sizes. Like the architecture of a building, a complete Business Intelligence architecture contains the foundation and structure of your solution. Using the building analogy, a data platform can take on many forms, like a single-story cottage, a sprawling university campus or a towering skyscraper. For the data platform, the foundation is the selection of source data that are shaped, cleansed and transformed for repo ..read more

I wanted to share the results of a few experiments I recent conducted with one of my favorite sets of sample data. This will take at least two blog posts to cover, but I will summarize them here: Compare data load & transformations with CSV files vs a Fabric lakehouse using the SQL Server connector: Loading 20 million fact rows from CSV files vs a Fabric lakehouse, using Power Query. Same comparison with deployed Power BI model. Comparing Fabric data transformation options & performance: Loading & transforming the same data with Power BI Desktop, Fabric Gen2 dataflows, Fabric pipel ..read more

I just read that the Miss Universe contestant from Panama was evicted from the Miss Universe pageant. I don’t know ..read more

I work with hundreds of consulting clients who go through the same cycles, having the same experiences, facing the same challenges, many making the same mistakes, and many learning some of the same lessons. The purpose of this series is to share those lessons with you. Universal Best Practices If we sum up Power BI best practices at the highest level, it is that all projects of any scale and size should adhere to the same general set of guidelines, categorically. Your Power BI project no matter how small or large should address every category in the following list. The specific design patterns ..read more

Advice and lessons learned from working with consulting clients for nearly one year since Fabric was released. How to approach architecting solutions, choosing from among Fabric assets and tools, and getting your organization ready for Fabric adoption, developing, managing and deploying successful Fabric solutions ..read more

I created this report to summarize the release status for all Fabric features that are documented in the Microsoft Fabric Roadmap. The information on this report is collected and updated frequently from the Fabric Roadmap hosted by Microsoft, and displays status information in a convenient, single-page Power BI report. Each feature area on the report has links to the detail documentation on the official roadmap site. For convenience, I've shortened the report path to TinyURL.com/FabricRoadmapReport ..read more

I just returned from the Microsoft Fabric Community Conference in Las Vegas. Over 4,000 attendees saw a lot of demos showing how to effortlessly build a modern data platform with petabytes of data in One Lake, and then ask CoPilot to generate beautiful Power BI reports from semantic models that magically appear from data in a Fabric Lakehouse. Is Direct Lake the silver bullet solution that will finally deliver incredibly fast analytic reporting over huge volumes of data in any form, in real time? Will Direct Lake models replace Import model and solve the dreaded DirectQuery mode performance pr ..read more

Fabric is here but what does that mean if you are using Power BI? What do you need to know and what, if anything will you need to change if you are a Power BI report designer, developer or BI solution architect? What parts of Fabric should you use now and how do you plan for the near-term future? As I write this in March of 2024, I'm at the Microsoft MVP Summit at the Microsoft campus in Redmond, Washington this week learning about what the product teams will be working on over the next year or so. Fabric is center stage in every conversation and session. To say that Fabric has moved my cheese ..read more