Paul Turley's SQL Server BI Blog
sharing my experiences with the Microsoft data platform, SQL Server BI, Data Modeling, SSAS Design, Power Pivot, Power BI, SSRS Advanced Design, Power BI, Dashboards & Visualization since 2009
Just a little bit of last minute work to do… loading 196 USB drives with materials for the session. Looking forward to meeting you if you are attending the Tuesday precon.
It's not a requirement for the session to follow along, but if you would like, you may bring a laptop capable of running SQL Server 2017 and Reporting Services to follow along with demos. Some selected lab materials from my 2, 3 and 4-day classes will be provided.
I just returned from the Microsoft Fabric Community Conference in Las Vegas. Over 4,000 attendees saw a lot of demos showing how to effortlessly build a modern data platform with petabytes of data in One Lake, and then ask CoPilot to generate beautiful Power BI reports from semantic models that magically appear from data in a Fabric Lakehouse. Is Direct Lake the silver bullet solution that will finally deliver incredibly fast analytic reporting over huge volumes of data in any form, in real time? Will Direct Lake models replace Import model and solve the dreaded DirectQuery mode performance problems of the past? The answer is No, but Direct Lake can break some barriers. This post is a continuation of my previous post titled “Moving from Power BI to Microsoft fabric”.
Direct Lake is a new semantic model storage mode introduced in Microsoft Fabric, available to enterprise customers using Power BI Premium and Fabric capacities. It is an extension of the Analysis Services Vertipaq in-memory analytic engine that reads data directly from the Delta-parquet structured storage files in a Fabric lakehouse or warehouse.
Fabric is here but what does that mean if you are using Power BI? What do you need to know and what, if anything will you need to change if you are a Power BI report designer, developer or BI solution architect? What parts of Fabric should you use now and how do you plan for the near-term future? As I write this in March of 2024, I’m at the Microsoft MVP Summit at the Microsoft campus in Redmond, Washington this week learning about what the product teams will be working on over the next year or so. Fabric is center stage in every conversation and session. To say that Fabric has moved my cheese would be a gross understatement. I’ve been working with data and reporting solutions for about 30 years and have seen many products come and go. Everything I knew about working with databases, data warehouses, transforming and reporting on data has changed recently BUT it doesn’t mean that everyone using Power BI must stop what they are doing and adapt to these changes. The core product is unchanged. Power BI still works as it always has.
The introduction of Microsoft Fabric in various preview releases over the past two years have immersed me into the world of Spark, Python, parquet-Delta storage, lakehouses and medallion data warehouse architectures. These technologies, significantly different from the SQL Server suite of products I’ve known and loved for the past twenty years, represent a major shift in direction, forming the backbone of OneLake; Microsoft’s universal integrated data platform that hosts all the components comprising Fabric. They built all of Fabric on top of the existing Power BI service, so all of the data workloads live inside familiar workspaces, accessible through the Power BI web-based portal (now called the Fabric portal).
In my view, projects and teams of different sizes have different needs. I described DevOps maturity as a pyramid, where most projects don’t require a sophisticated DevOps implementation, and the most complex solutions do. The DevOps maturity is a progression, but only for projects of a certain scale. One of the following options might simply be the best fit for a particular project.
Unless you are throwing together a simple Power BI report that you don’t plan to maintain and add features to, the first and most basic managed project should start with a PBIX file or Power BI Project folder stored in a shared and cloud-backed storage location.
DevOps isn’t a requirement for all projects, but version control and shared file storage definitely is.
Hi Paul. Loved your Complete BI Tool Belt session at PASS. You discussed an ongoing struggle of mine, exporting SSRS to Excel, and said that’s not what SSRS is designed for. I’m wondering if you have any suggestions for alternative tools?
All really need is a simple parameter/filter UI for users and a clean export to Excel. I’m not concerned about high fidelity formatting.