The Latest Power BI Updates: Bring Your Own Key; Paginated reports; Dataflow templates; Report Builder; Viewer role

June was a month chock full of Power BI announcements, many timed with the Business Applications Summit in Atlanta. In a follow on to the event, Microsoft released videos of the key note, information on the product roadmap and more details on AI, enterprise BI, data visualization and modeling features. Among the variety of "enterprise-grade" features announced around the Summit is Bring Your Own Key, offered for Power BI Premium. Although all data in Power BI is encrypted at rest, organizations that want additional controls can configure the system to use their own keys, housed in Azure Key Vaults. BYOK doesn't apply to query caches, data sourced from SQL Server Analysis Services, paginated reports, dataflow data or Excel workbooks.

Following June's general availability of paginated reports, Microsoft has added some small updates. Within the subscription pane, users will be able to expand and view parameter values and change them, for instance showing the first page of a paginated report in an email. Within the admin portal, users can also assign between 50 and 100 percent of capacity memory to a paginated report. Furthermore, oAuth support for Azure SQL expands the ability to enforce row-level security.

Akin to the addition of oAuth support, Microsoft continues to focus on unifying data from different sources. Dataflow templates can help to map data in the Common Data Model within Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 by predefining the entities and field mappings. The templates released in June are all oriented to Dynamics 365 for Sales and Salesforce. For dataflows, the team added an enhanced Compute Engine in preview, which works best if users split data ingestions into different dataflows and apply transformation logic.