If you haven’t done so, watch the “Power BI and the Future for Modern and Enterprise BI” presentation from the Business Applications Summit (July 22-24) to find where Microsoft is bringing Power BI in the next few months.
Power BI Service Scale and Adoption
- 19M data models hosted
- 58M monthly publish to web views
- 8M+ report and dashboard queries/hour
- Power BI a top 10 fastest growing skill according to Upwork
Microsoft will extend Power BI by investing in three main areas:
- Unified platform for both self-service and enterprise BI
- Intuitive experience that drive a data culture
- Pervasive Artificial Intelligence for BI
Here are most important forthcoming near-future features across these three areas:
Unified platform for both self-service and enterprise BI
- Make Power BI Desktop a better tool for larger models — new diagram view with perspectives, multi-select fields to set common properties (it’s about time to have this feature), display folders as in SSAS
- Composite models (delivered in July 2018 release) – I covered this killer feature in my blog “Power BI Composite Models: The Good, The Bad, The Ugly“
- Aggregations – Ability to define aggregations as we can do in SSAS MD. The demo showed an impressive response time for summarized views on top of a 1 trillion row dataset.
- Multi-geo deployments
Intuitive experience that drive data culture
- Certified datasets
- Application lifecycle managements (DEV, QA, PROD environments)
- Dataflows – dataflows refer to what was announced as “datapools” and Common Data Model for Analytics (review my comments here).
- Modernized Visualizations pane (delivered in July 2018 release)
- Report wallpaper (delivered in July 2018 release)
- Out of box themes
- Visual headers (delivered in July 2018 release)
- Snap visual with other visuals
- Expression-based formatting for every property in the Visualizations pane – This is huge and my users would rejoice to have more control over report properties!
- Excel-like pivot tables
- Export to PDF – most voted feature will finally be delivered
Pervasive Artificial Intelligence for BI
- Quick Insights on right-click
- Natural questions with suggestions
- Quick insights inside natural questions results
- Integration with Python – Connector and custom visuals like R
- Sentiment analysis
- Integration with Microsoft Cognitive Services – The demo showed the model deducing that the images of air conditioners in a hotel are broken
- Better integration with Azure Machine Learning Studio
An impressive list of features indeed!
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