After last week, it appears that the Power BI team is still very busy, and after the announcement yesterday and the download of the Spring Roadmap there is a whole host of amazing things coming in the next few months!

Power BI Spring Roadmap

I will be going through the Power BI specific sections below to make it easier to understand what is coming where.

Power BI Desktop Announcements

All the details in the roadmap have almost been released, and as you can see from above Incremental refresh is coming to Power BI. Yes, it will currently start off in Power BI premium which is understandable as with current licensing for SSAS Tabular, if you want to partition your data (Which is what the incremental refresh is doing) you require an Enterprise License.

With that being said for large organizations this is going to be incredible to have their data updating in a fraction of the time.

Next is new is the Control over linguistic schema. Using the linguistic schema, the user can control the Q&A with phrasing and synonyms. Which translates to more options to people to ask Q&A questions and get the right answers.

Power BI Service Announcements

What I am showing in the image above is an SSRS (SQL Server Reporting Services) report being in the Power BI Service. That is really incredible considering people have been asking when SSRS will come to the cloud.

Now all the reporting requirements for an organization can be accessed from one central location. And not only that but with SSRS RDL reports there will be the capability to create pixel perfect reporting. This is really exciting.

A new capability is coming where you can pin items from Apps to your own dashboard. This will mean that you can create your own dashboard with items from different App sources.

There are also going to be more performance monitoring metrics for Power BI Premium so that people who run Power BI Premium are able to understand how it is performing and if there are any areas of concern.

Along with this as previously announced P4 and P5 Power BI Premium Capacities

Data source improvements where it will be easier to administer Gateways as well as being able to understand what is running where with regards to the multiple data sources.

There is also going to be some query acceleration for DirectQuery datasets that are very large in size. This appears to be done by building in-memory aggregations ont op of data sources such as     Spark and Azure SQL Data Warehouse. Which will then return the results almost instantly.

It looks like there is going to be some AI integrated into receiving the smart alerts. Which will assist in trying to deliver the right alerts to the end users. As well as the option to customize the alerts.

When the Power BI report is in Full screen mode it will cycle through the pages, which is great for when reports are being displayed on large monitors in hallways or shared spaces.

There is the move away from having the dependency of Office 365 groups within Power BI. In the new move it will all be managed within Power BI.

This will mean that assigning workspace roles to individual users, Azure AD security groups, and Office 365 modern groups will be controlled and live within Power BI.

What will be coming to Power BI Premium is the ability to be able to create report snapshots, and then decide via the multiple options on how to process and deliver the reports.

The administrator of the App Workspace or people can subscribe other users for email subscriptions.

That this essentially is, is a central place to store all your common data in your business. For example a list of all your customers are stored in the Common Data Servers for Analytics (CDSA). Then when a user wants to use Customer details they do not have to go and find the information and bring it into their dataset, they can leverage straight out of the CDSA.

The data can be ingested using the very familiar Power Query experience, as well as consuming the Get Data experience, which will also have the capability to connect via the On-Premise data gateway.

All this will sit on Azure storage, which can be added to with your existing Azure investments.

There will be a host of options in terms of how apps can connect and leverage the CDSA. This can be from Microsoft, from 3rd party providers or even potentially your own in-house created Apps.

All these details as well as more details can be found here: Accelerating digital transformation with the spring 2018 release for Dynamics 365 and Business Application Platform

Power Report Server – March Update

As you can see above the Power BI Report server has been updated with all the latest features from Power BI Desktop. This is incredible considering that some of these features were only released this month.

All the details are in the blog post: Power BI Report Server Update – March 2018

Power BI – Building the Opioid Power BI Report

Will Thompson from the Power BI team, goes into a very detailed blog post on how he created the Opioid Power report for the Gartner Bake off. I have put this aside as I still want to go through all the options and features and see how he managed to build such an awesome report.

You can find the blog post here, as well as the option to download the PBIX: Building our report on the opioid crisis for the Gartner bakeoff