MS Build 2024 Announcements

MS Build was yesterday, and as has become the custom, Microsoft unloaded a huge wave of announcements including the latest release to Power BI and new capabilities in Fabric. I'm going to need some extra coffee today because I was up late trying to digest all this info (which is not recommended). Here's my summary of interesting highlights:

First in Power BI

• Matrix visuals now have new format options to make them look more like Excel PivotTables. This seems to be the most popular highlight on social media.
• With workspace folders now in preview on the Power BI Service, Power BI Desktop can now publish directly into these folders (also a preview feature).
• You can open live connected Power BI files in SharePoint or OneDrive in your browser. This is a nice alternative to publishing drafts to the service in order to get feedback from co-workers.
• DAX query view is out of preview and generally available.
• Also now generally available is the model explorer and authoring calculation groups in Desktop

Those last two points make me question if I need to continue using Tabular Editor 3. I like TE3, and if I spent a lot of time actively developing semantic models, I would see the benefit. Once TMDL is out of preview and fully adopted by TE3 and the Power BI Project format, I think I'll be able to get by with just Desktop for the occasional semantic model work.

Now in the rest of Fabric

• External data sharing allows you to share a Fabric item like a data warehouse to your partner organizations as easily as you would share a PowerPoint file from OneDrive (not sure making it that easy is a good thing). This feels very similar to Snowflake's data sharing feature.
• Time travel in Fabric data warehouses allow you to go back in time (up to 7 days) and query the data as it was. Another feature eerily similar to Snowflake.
• Fully managed GraphQL APIs let you easily create APIs to your data. This is not my typical interest, but I can think of some good use cases for this. For example, if you want to make some data accessible to another app your company supports. Developers can fetch the data they need with an API call instead of exporting data out to another database or creating a database connection to your warehouse.
• A lot of focus was on the enhancements to Real-Time Intelligence. Fabric has created many capabilities to better support real-time use cases. There is a dedicated Real-Time Hub, an item type called an Eventhouse, AI assisted anomaly detection, Real-Time Dashboards (not the same as Power BI), integration with Data Activator, and more. I'll have to dedicate more time later to understanding these options and how I might use them.
• Data workflows brings a fully managed Apache Airflow experience to Fabric. Airflow is a popular open-source python based orchestrator. I think Data pipelines accomplishes the same thing, but this will probably entice existing Airflow users to move their workloads into Fabric.

The other announcement that really caught my interest was the joint one between Microsoft and Snowflake. Later this year, Fabric and Snowflake will allow seamless access to the same data using OneLake. In other words, you can access and run workloads on the same data with either platform without copying data around. This ability is possible using Apache Iceberg format for tables. Iceberg tables stored in OneLake will be accessible to Snowflake, and Fabric using another Apache project called XTable will be able to read the same Iceberg tables using the Delta Lake format. I'll admit I don't know much about Iceberg or Delta Lake, but I'm intrigued.

At the same time, I'm scratching my head a bit trying to think of why I would want to do this in the first place. It probably appeals to really large organizations that have a lot of investment in both Snowflake and Fabric. I'll have more to say on this later.

https://blog.fabric.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/microsoft-fabric-may-2024-update