Last week (May 25-27, 2021) was Microsoft Build. Microsoft tends to use these types of events as an opportunity to either announce or at minimum celebrate new features that are on the way, and 2021 was no different. They followed up with this blog post and I thought I’d offer up my thoughts on these areas.
AI Powered Development
One of the big developments in this area is Natural Language to DAX generation. As someone who occasionally struggles with DAX, and supports users who have mixed results with DAX, I think this is going to be a good thing. That said, I’ve also been in the SQL world for a decade, and understand that some of the worst code written is computer-generated code. That said, if it can help cover 80% of what users need without having to learn DAX, it’s certainly an improvement over what we have now.
The other important piece to this is this sentence:
Power BI is committed to Microsoft’s responsible AI principles that ensure the use of AI is fair, inclusive, reliable, and respects privacy and security.
Why is this important? There is plenty of evidence of AI re-enforcing biases that can lead to poor outcomes for people who are already dealing with disparities. By being conscious of the issue and actively working to eliminate it, we can work toward eliminating these disparities.
Automatic Aggregations
Personally, I’m really excited about this one. There’s already an ability to do aggregations in Power BI, but it requires some work to setup. The result is a report that automatically shifts between the pre-aggregated results and the detailed results, depending on what the user is requesting. Generally the aggregations would be in “Import” mode, and the details may be “DirectQuery”, so it would take a bit longer for the user to see the data - but it would only be if the user is going after the details. The hope would be that the aggregations cover the majority of the use cases, to prevent the users from needing that detailed data.
What this feature now does is the whole bit above, automatically. The system will determine what things would benefit from this setup, and automatically shift the granularity to make it happen efficiently. If you have a big dataset, I’d encourage you to keep an eye out for this feature to be released in the coming months (a preview is expected in July).
Streaming Dataflows
Honestly, I haven’t had much experience with streaming data in Power BI. If you ask the average business user whether or not they need realtime data, the answer is “yes”. But after I start asking more probing questions, I usually end up doing a nightly refresh. I realize this will not always be the case, and the thirst for realtime data is definitely there - but the systems behind it aren’t necessarily ready for it. With this feature, we’ll be able to create dataflows to take advantage of real-time data, while combining it with reference data to help drive better realtime decision making.
Jupyter Notebooks Embedding
I love the concept of Jupyter notebooks, but haven’t had much of a chance myself to work with them. I do enjoy the notebook concept, and the idea of being able to embed a Power BI report directly in them. I don’t think this is a feature every user will be excited about, but people who are already using R and Python in Jupyter notebooks are probably happy about this one.
Deployment Pipeline Automation APIs
I’ve been lucky enough to use Deployment Pipelines in Power BI Premium, and it’s a great step toward separating your development, test, and production environments. With this new feature, you’ll be able to better embed this experience into your source control process (you are saving your .PBIX files in source control, right?) and ensure your code is safely stored before deploying it to your environment.
Conclusion
Microsoft continues to push forward with innovative ideas in Power BI, and it’s always exciting to see these new features! I do sometimes wish they’d continue working on their existing features before adding more new ones, but it’s all good stuff that continues to drive the product and the entire industry forward. I’m always excited to see what’s coming next! Which of these are you most excited about? Use the comments below to let me know!