There haven’t been any really big BI announcements at the PASS Summit this year – I guess we get so much amazing new stuff every month with Power BI that there’s no need to make ‘big’ announcements at conferences any more. However there have been several cool new features unveiled that I thought it would be good to highlight.
Azure SSAS automated scale-out
I’m a big fan of Azure SSAS, and what I particularly like is the way the dev team are making tasks that are complex with on-premises SSAS much easier when you go to the cloud. SSAS scale-out is a great example: on-premises you have to solve this by buying multiple servers, licensing and maintaining multiple instances of SSAS, and then setting up network load balancing on top of them. Today the Azure SSAS team announced their automated scale-out feature is live, and now all you need to do to scale out is drag a slider to the right:
Of course this is all scriptable too, so if you know you need to have to handle more users on a Monday morning you can scale-out appropriately and then when the rush is over you can reduce the number of query replicas and pay less.
Power BI Report Server
There’s a new release of Power BI Report Server available, and you can read all about it here:
https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/new-version-of-power-bi-report-server-now-available/
The blog post highlights the fact that you can connect to SSRS shared datasets via OData – which is basically what I was talking about here.
Preview of in-memory/DirectQuery hybrid datasets
Christian Wade of the SSAS dev team gave a very cool demo of building Power BI reports on a trillion row dataset. Not many details are available about how this works, or when it will be released, but it seems to be through a feature where you can combine tables stored in-memory and tables that use DirectQuery storage (in the demo this was DirectQuery on Spark) in the same dataset. It sounds a bit like HOLAP: queries that request aggregated values hit the fast, in-memory data, but when you want to look at detail-level data queries use DirectQuery. Someone is very excited about this:
PowerApps/Power BI integration
Something that was going to be demoed – but the demo failed so we didn’t see it – was the promised integration between PowerApps and Power BI. Apparently this will be released soon.
ESRI Plus subscription for Power BI
Mentioned in the keynote but again with very few details is the fact that ESRI is going to offer a special subscription for users of the ESRI maps visual in Power BI. It looks like this is it and it is slated for release in November:
http://go.esri.com/plus-subscription
Here’s what the ESRI site says the benefits will be:
- Access global demographics
- Access verified ready-to-use data, curated from authoritative sources
- Access more basemaps including satellite imagery and terrain
- Map and view more locations on your visualization
Good summary!
Thanks for the update Chris.
Regarding Azure SSAS scale out, will it be possible to specify geographic location/region of the replicas to ensure fast access from anywhere? Or is that perhaps taken care of automatically under the hood?