Microsoft Power BI Blog Note

Microsoft Power BI Blog

Power BI is a business analytics service by Microsoft. It allows users to create interactive visualizations and business intelligence reports on data from various sources, including databases, cloud services, spreadsheets, and more. One of the key features of Power BI is its ability to connect to diverse data sources, such as Excel files, SQL Server, Oracle, Azure Cosmos DB, and even websites. This allows users to analyze and visualize data in various contexts and create comprehensive reports. Power BI provides various tools for data preparation, visualization, and analysis. It includes a suite of data transformation functions that make it easy to extract, transform, and load data from these sources directly into the Power BI application. Users can then create reports by using various visualizations such as charts, graphs, maps, and gauges, which can be arranged on dashboards. Power BI integrates well with other Microsoft products, such as Azure Stack, Access, Azure, and SQL Server, but it can also be integrated with other applications like Google Analytics, Salesforce, or SharePoint, among many others. Users can share their reports within their organizations using the Power BI Service, which offers various access levels for collaborative work. For instance, users can share direct links to reports, schedule automatic refresh of reports, or embed them in websites or SharePoint sites. The Power BI Community page is active and provides a forum for users to share knowledge, request new features, and find available resources. Power BI also regularly releases updates, new features, and bug fixes.

Thread Of Notes

Customers moving to allocation-based billing often ask how to control resource consumption for specific workloads. Custom SQL Pools offer a solution by providing workload isolation and governance, which directly impacts resource usage. These pools allow customers to intentionally trade off performance for a smaller resource footprint. For instance, a bursty reporting workload limited by a Custom SQL Pool might scale to fewer resources, run longer, but consume fewer billed resources. A real-world example involves an ETL process that was not latency-sensitive but needed controlled resource consumption. By restricting throughput, the ETL workload ran longer but consumed resources at a smoother rate. Custom SQL Pools are ideal for non-latency-sensitive workloads that can tolerate longer runtimes and compete for resources. They are particularly useful for ETL, background processing, and Power BI reporting to ensure predictable resource consumption. It's important to note that Custom SQL Pools are not direct spending limits or budget caps. Instead, they act as guardrails defining maximum resource access for each workload. Future enhancements include identity-based resource allocation and configurable built-in workload boundaries for greater flexibility. Ultimately, Custom SQL Pools empower customers with more explicit control over resource allocation and governance. The primary function is workload management, but in an allocation-based billing model, this indirectly helps manage consumption. If a workload can run longer, Custom SQL Pools can effectively reduce its resource consumption.
The July 2026 Power BI update introduces new capabilities across reporting, modeling, mobile, and embedded analytics. The update includes expanded modern visual defaults, conditional formatting improvements for line charts and legends, and new org app capabilities and APIs. The Power BI DataViz World Championships is also ongoing, with Round Two currently open and a wildcard finalist to be selected from standout submissions. Additionally, the European Microsoft Fabric and SQL Community Conference will take place in Barcelona, Spain, from September 28 to October 1, featuring exclusive content, live demos, and key announcements. The old file picker experience in Power BI Desktop has been deprecated, and users are advised to update to the latest version to continue using the functionality. The update also includes improvements to report page tab navigation, simplified title spacing for visuals, and support for bookmarks and storytelling in org apps. Furthermore, the LOOKUP function in visual calculations now supports INFERRED mode for associated columns, and org apps with audiences are now generally available. The update also brings modeling improvements, including the ability to add measure descriptions in line with triple-slash comments, and Model Options are now available in the Power BI Service. Overall, the July 2026 Power BI update aims to enhance the user experience and provide more features and capabilities for users to work with data and analytics. The update is designed to help users create more effective reports, visualize data, and make informed decisions.
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