There sure has been a whole host of updates and additions in the world of BI in the past week. So here they are below.

Power BI – New On-Premise Gateway

This is another great update that I did not see coming. But it does make total sense. As well as great to have a single point in which you can leverage Power BI, Power Apps, Microsoft Flow and Azure Logic Apps.

I already have been using it for Power BI and it has made the connection to On-Premise data so easy to gain access to and leverage existing investments.

You can find all the details here: Gateways July update – going beyond Power BI

Power BI – Data Stories Gallery

This is a great incentive to see your data as a story. I also think that this will give some great insights into what people are doing and using Power BI to not only tell a story but to also leverage what they have done and how they have utilized Power BI.

You can find all the information here: Share inspiration in the new Data Stories Gallery (and get a t-shirt!)

Power BI – Embedded General Availability Coming soon.

For the ISV’s and companies that are looking to leverage Power BI into their applications it is great to see that it will be Generally available on 11 July 2016.

This will also bring with it all the capabilities that you would expect, as well as I have no doubt some additional features further down the road.

You can find out about the announcement here: Power BI Embedded General Availability coming soon!

Power BI – Publish to Web Generally Available

This is a feature of Power BI that I think really goes a long way to get people interested and using Power BI. The publish to web feature is so easy to use to get it out there. As well as being included in the Power BI license cost, means that when you want to share this, it can be done.

And I am sure that more features will be added further down the line.

You can find all the details here: Power BI publish to web General Availability

Power BI – New Visuals

We seem to be getting some additional visuals coming from the Microsoft Research team which is great to see.

The Strippets Browser can be used to view a collection of documents or news stream. There appears to be two ways to interact with this visual. The first is where you can view the information as a thumbnail, and if you click on the thumbnail it will provide you with more information. Second is the option to use the outlines view, where it strips it all down to create a visual cross-section of a document collection.

The Cluster Map is where you can view the topics in a document collection in an expressive image mosaic.

The Facet Key shows the most frequent entities and enables you to systematically analyze them.

You can find all the details here: New Power BI Custom Visuals Enable Browsing and Analyzing Collections of Text

SQL Server – R Client

It is great to see that Microsoft have finally released their own version of the R Client. This is to compliment their existing investments with R in SQL Server 2016. As well as it being open source, community-supported I have no doubt that this will be the go to R Client in the near future.

You can find the details here: Introducing the free Microsoft R Client

SQL Server – Migration Assistant for Datazen

This is a migration assistant for customers who currently have got a Datazen Server and Content and want to migrate it to SQL Server 2016.

You can find all the related information here: SQL Server Migration Assistant for Datazen Preview now available

Excel – Faster Pivot Tables in Excel 2016

It is nice to see that they have not forgotten about OLAP servers, as this could well apply to both the multidimensional and tabular OLAP models.

And who does not like things that are faster? And it is great to see these additions in improved query efficiency, reducing the number of queries and smarter caches.

You can find the details here: Faster OLAP PivotTables in Excel 2016

Azure – SQL Data Warehouse Generally Available

Just a quick note that the Azure SQL Data Warehouse is now Generally Available.

The blog post does list all of the capabilities and not only that but it appears to also make use of the premium storage in the data centres which means that you can scale it even higher in terms of DWU.

You can find the blog post here: Announcing the general availability of Azure SQL Data Warehouse, an elastic, parallel, columnar data warehouse as a service.