Premium per user
The biggest new development is without question that it will be possible to have Power BI Service Premium per user, which thus allows everyone to enjoy Premium features such as Paginated Reports, Data Flows, XLMA-Endpoint, Deployment Pipelines, etc.
Thus far, you had to buy Premium capacity on the Power BI service to gain access, which was not exactly cheap, but starting in November, it will be possible to purchase these for the individual user. Think of it as an extended Pro licence.
This should result in a good opportunity for small and medium sized enterprises to gain the full benefits of Premium features in Power BI and really feel the whole Power BI experience.
From November, this is in Public Preview, and the rumours say that you will be able to get it at the same price as a Pro licence, but when it goes in GA then the price will surely be different. Christopher Finlan was nice enough to write a blog post that answers various questions concerning this feature. Read it here.
Visual data prep
There was also some exciting news about Power Query in Power BI. Later this year, it will be possible to make drag & drop transformations of your data in Power Query. This should result in more options for accessing Power BI as a self-service tool.
To begin with, it will be an online implementation, where you will be able to use the functionality in Power BI dataflows; however, it will also be added to Power BI Desktop during the next calendar year.
Power BI Synapse accelerator
Microsoft’s big move on the Cloud side, Azure Synapse Analytics, will undergo closer and closer integration with Power BI.
The newest feature in the preview is a configuration in Synapse where you can choose that Synapse monitors the queries that are sent from Power BI to Synapse. Then, Synapse performs so-called Materialized Views, which generates the content of the most used queries, thus allowing Synapse to send data back to Power BI right away.
Small but important: Maintain Layer Order
Finally, we can mention a small change in Power BI Desktop, which may not look like much, but it could make a world of difference to the development and use of Power BI reports.
Thus far, whenever a visualisation was selected, this visualisation would be pulled into the foreground, which makes sense since you selected it. However, there are times when this is not ideal, particularly if you are building advanced navigation. It is now possible for the individual visualisation to always remain where it is.
Presentation on demand
Finally, I want to conclude by saying that the different presentations from Ignite are now available on demand – so if you want to, you can watch or re-watch the best ones right here.
We recommend:
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Deliver insights where decisions are made with Power BI
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Building systems of insights for enterprise scale with Power BI and Azure
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Building real-time enterprise analytics solutions with Azure Synapse Analytics
Generally, there has not been a great deal of Power BI news announced on Ignite, but we were also a bit spoiled at Business Application Summit earlier this year (read the news here). However, as you can see, there was still some news that really caught our attention.
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