BI-NSIGHT – Power BI (Service Update, Desktop Update, Dynamic Security in Service, Content Pack Dynamics AX Cost Management Pack) – SQL Server 2016 (RTM Release 01 June 2016)
There has been another busy week in the world of BI, here are the details.
Power BI – Service Update for Drilling into Data
It appears that the features that have put as part of the Power BI Desktop update are now also in the Power BI Service.
This is great and I have no doubt that further details will be release soon.
If you click on an actual item in a bar chart for instance you can then get the option to See Records as shown below
Which as you can see above it shows as being selected.
Now when you click on the actual item in the bar chart instead of it filtering your Power BI report, it shows you all the records that made up that total
Power BI – Desktop Update
There have been a whole host of great updates to Power BI Desktop, which I will highlight the ones that I have found very interesting below.
By far the two biggest features of the Power BI Desktop update are the templates and parameters. I have already seen some great blog posts on how to leverage both of these new features. ( Power BI Templates – Datachant )And this does mean that you now can create a consistent way of publishing your reports. As well as not having to re-create it ever time.
Next is the parameters, which is something that I would almost say is similar to creating a function using Power Query. But that it is a lot easier to create and then to use within your Power Query query.
Also the Drill action to see records is a great welcome as this will mean that now people can drill down to see the actual records in their data. Which is often requested by users.
Time Intelligence is something that people have been using work arounds for and is great to see that it is finally in the product. This will go a long way to helping with the development of the Power BI reports and dashboards, as very often everything is based around a time line of some sort.
Another feature that I am excited about is the Synonyms, as this is something that was in Power Pivot and I had used it often because the way the data or columns are structured vs what the business users or people refer to the same information is often very different. And I am finding that more and more often I am using Q&A to quickly build a dashboard item. And with the synonyms this makes it a lot easier to achieve this.
And finally under Data Connectivity there is a whole host of new features and updates which increases the ever increasing demand for additional data sets.
You can read all the details here: Power BI Desktop April update feature summary
Power BI – Dynamic Security in the Service
Here is a very good and interesting article where Koen Verbeeck explains how he got it up and running. And no doubt that this will be improved over time.
You can find out all the details here: Dynamic Security in Power BI
Power BI – Dynamics AX Content Pack for Cost Management
This is the third iteration for the Dynamics AX content packs from Power BI. This time it is for Cost Management which provides details for operation performance for Coo’s and CFO’s
This is another great content pack to see additional insights into the Dynamics AX data.
You can find more details here: Analyze your Microsoft Dynamics AX data with Power BI
SQL Server 2016 – RTM Release 01 June 2016
It has amazed me that they have been able to release SQL Server 2016 so soon. And there are so many great features in the new additional I am sure that a lot of companies will be looking to upgrade to get the new features.
Along with this, it is great to see that they have included some BI features into the standard edition listed below. Which means that we can at least leverage some of the BI features without the hefty price tag for smaller customers. Here is a quick overview.
- Multidimensional DAX queries
- BI Semantic Model or SSAS Tabular (But this does not include perspectives nor Direct Query Mode in the standard edition)
- SSIS Azure, Hadoop & HDFS connectors
- Ability to pin SSRS report items to Power BI Dashboards.
As well as a whole host of additional features and updates in the SQL Server 2016 product.
You can find all the details here: Get ready, SQL Server 2016 coming on June 1st