This week has been another amazing and interesting week with regards to Power BI.

So here are is the latest information that I could get my hands on!

Power BI – GA (General Availability)

This week finally Power BI will go into General Availability. Which has been a long time coming and something that I have been looking forward to ever since it was announced.

I can remember reading about all the changes that are going to be coming out this summer (Northern Hemisphere), and eagerly waiting to see what these changes would be. Would some of the items that I have voted for be in the upcoming updates. And indeed some of them are. Which is great and shows how Microsoft has started to listen to what the customers and users are looking for.

In my opinion I do think that in a year’s time, Power BI will be an amazing product with a whole host of new features and usability that we previously had never thought of!

It is great to see that they are going to be releasing updates in the same way as they have done with Power Query. Due to this being out of the Office and particularly Excel, it means that they can make changes, updates and new functionality which will be rolled out on a regular basis. And what that means of both the customers and the developers is that we get an ever evolving product.

One of the things that I wanted to highlight is that I did test out the new Rendering engine. And not only does it look amazing, with so many customizations, it is also lightning fast. I mean really fast when you click on a visualization. They do speak about it in the Power BI – GA and beyond… but WOW to actually use it and try it out, it is quick.

You can either vote for existing idea’s or create your own idea here: Microsoft Power BI Support

As well as if you are looking for help or want to help out they have also created a fantastic community which can be found here: Microsoft Power BI Community

And finally you can read all about the Power BI GA here: Power BI – GA and beyond…

Power BI Updates

Along with the Power BI GA (General Availability) coming at the end of the week, the extremely busy people at Microsoft have started rolling out some of the changes into the online Power BI Service.

There are quite a few changes which I will put in point form below, which you can read about in full at the bottom of this post.

  • Team Collaboration
  • Organizational Content Packs
  • Free Trial for Power BI Pro
  • Bring While Excel File/s into Power BI
  • Upload CSV Content
  • Replace Excel, Power BI Desktop, and CSV Files into Power BI
  • Row-Level Security For On-Premises AS Tabular Model.

There is quite a bit of information above, and some of it is based around an organization and some of the updates are based for end users. But they are all amazing features and something that I can see being used on a daily basis.

I have to highlight importing Excel Files into Power BI from OneDrive. This is another great feature, the reason for this is that not everyone uses Power Pivot in Excel. A lot of people are used to using the Sheets within Excel and this is where their strengths are. So providing the ability for people to upload their Excel files and be able to consume it from within Excel and then visualize it is another avenue to show the value of the work and their data that they created!

You can read about it here: Power BI Weekly Service Update

Here is another screenshot of the Text Box from Jen Underwood (@idigdata)

Power BI – Limit of 10 Reports per Dataset

I came across the blog post by Adam W. Saxton which describes an error some users were getting when trying to save a report and getting the above error.

It appears that currently there is a limit of 10 reports per dataset. I personally think that this should be sufficient. Due to the fact that you can have multiple pages within each report. As well as if there is a requirement to create more than 10 reports, there must be a lot of data to visualize, and there could be the potential with all the reports for the impact of the visualizations to be lost with so many reports.

The one thing to note from the details below, is that it is for each dataset ONLY. If you create a new report on a different dataset, you then will be able to create another 10 reports!

As well as this applying to both the Free and Pro versions.

You can read about this limit here: Limit of 10 Reports per Dataset/Data Model

SQL Server 2016 CTP 2.2

Browsing through Twitter this morning I came across an update to SQL Server 2016, and there is an update with regards to CTP2.2

I quickly found the details on the SQL Server Blog, which I will post the link to afterwards. I had a quick read through to see if there was anything new relating specifically to BI.

I was happy to see that they included two new chart types. Namely Sunburst and Treemap. This lead me to quickly create a VM and see what they actually look like!

Unfortunately due to time constraints and not really knowing where to exploit the new chart types I could not actually see what they look like in Reporting Services.

There have also been some updates to MDS, which allows Compound Keys, SCD Type 2 and syncing an entity between models.

You can read all about it here: SQL Server 2016 Upgrade Advisor Preview and CTP 2.2 now available