As expected this week with SQL Pass, there has been a whole host of new capabilities and features in Power BI, so please see my roundup below with the relevant links below.

And even though there is a lot of announcements here, we are still waiting for the update to Power BI Desktop!!

Power BI Dataflows

One of the biggest updates and releases to Power BI is dataflows. I personally think that this is a MASSIVE differentiator from other players in the Self-Service space.

The first thing I would like to highlight is that this is available to both Power BI Pro and Premium Customers. Below is a table of the key differences.

Dataflows allows you to now build data purely inside the Power BI Service, that stores the data in Azure Data Lake Gen2.

There are so many advantages to this:

  • Not only does it allow the business user to easily access data and use it in their data model as a data source (like SQL Server)
  • It also allows for the linking of entities (Premium feature)
  • It allows for Incremental Refreshing (Premium Feature)
  • Linking of entities which works like Excel (Premium Feature)

I would highly recommend that you read the blog post here: Introducing: Power BI data prep with dataflows

And here is the link to the Whitepaper: Understanding Dataflows in Power BI

Power BI Paginated Reports (SSRS)

There is now the capability to be able to use SSRS in the cloud. This is really great news and I am certain that there are a lot of customers who have been patiently waiting for SSRS to be available in the cloud.

It is now available in Power BI Premium. And along with this out of the box there are a lot of features that are already there, and some additional features which will come later. No doubt it is a very different set of requirements to build something that will work in the cloud vs an On-Premise implementation.

Some of the potential new capabilities which will be coming in the future to Paginated reports are:

  • Support for scheduling and sending paginated reports using e-mail subscriptions and having attachments
  • Embedding in third-party applications
  • Authoring reports against Power BI datasets
  • The ability to seamlessly drill through from a Power BI report to a paginated report in the service

All the details can be found in the blog post: Public Preview of Paginated Reports in Power BI Premium Now Available

Power BI Premium Metrics App includes metrics for Dataflows & Paginated Reports

It is incredible to see the pace of innovation from Microsoft and the Power BI team. Even though both dataflows and paginated reports have just been released you can now already use the Power BI Premium metrics app to see metrics for dataflows and paginated reports.

You can now see the following metrics for Paginated reports

  • Total views of the report with average for row count
  • Total time spent on the reports between retrieval/processing/rendering
  • Split by hour, dataflow name, and workspace name

The following is also available for data flows

  • Total refresh count
  • Refresh reliability
  • Average/max duration and average/max wait times of dataflow refreshes by dataflow name and workspace name

You can find more details on the Power BI Premium Metrics App here: Paginated report metrics and dataflow metrics now available in Premium Capacity Metrics app

Power BI Mobile App with support for Paginated Reports

If you update your Power BI Mobile App, you will now have the capability to be able to see paginated reports directly within your Power BI mobile app.

Once again it is incredible to see all the new functionality released across the entire platform, not only to the Power BI Service, but to the mobile app also.

It is available in the Android, iOS and Windows Apps

More details can be found here: Power BI Paginated Reports also available in Power BI Mobile Apps (preview)

Power BI Mobile and Service updates for Oct 2018

A lot of the updates for the Power BI Mobile and Service app have already been covered in other blog posts.

Below is a list of the updates with the relevant links