Thoughts On Power Query/Common Data Service Integration

Yesterday there was a webinar on how Power Query is going to be used as the way to load data into the Microsoft Common Data Service. You can watch it online here (if you’re in a hurry, skip to 24 minutes in for the details on the Power Query integration):

I don’t have much to add to what’s in the webinar, but there are a few things that occurred to me:

• This is Power Query in a browser. If they can build a web interface for Power Query for CDS, why not for Power BI? It would give us the full power of Power BI Desktop in the browser, on any platform (I know a few people have been asking for Power BI Desktop for Mac), with no tedious manual updating.
  
• In the demo at around the 54 minute mark, Miguel shows a screen where there are two Database Load options:
  
  The “Only load new or modified rows for existing entities” options is… incremental load! This makes me wonder whether Power BI users who want incremental load should be using using the CDS as a staging area (a super-simple data warehouse…?) and then connecting Power BI to it?

I’ll be honest, I’ve not done anything with the CDS so I can’t really say how useful this new functionality will actually be – and I’ve heard mixed reports about the CDS, if I’m honest. Certainly, as someone (I suspect Meagan), mentions in a question, the only way Power BI can connect to the CDS right now is via DirectQuery and not Import, which seems pretty crazy. Still… I’m very curious and will be paying close attention to how it develops. More Power Query in the world can only be a good thing!