Power BI & Power Apps Updates: Sensitivity labels; Synapse Analytics; Large models; New models; AI Builder models

In light of GDPR and other data protection regulations, the Power BI team worked with the Information Security and Cloud App Security teams over the last six months. The result is customizable and persistent sensitivity labels, data protection reports, governance policies that apply even when exporting to PDF or Excel and alerts, session monitoring and risk remediation via Cloud App Security.

Principal program manager Adi Regev explored more details of the data lineage and data protection enhancements while general manager Arun Ulag added that Power BI natively integrates with the newly announced Azure Synapse Analytics, to build reports directly from a Synapse workspace.

The team enhanced on-prem data gateway management options within the Power Platform Admin Center. Until recently, only gateways in a tenant's default region were visible in the admin center, but a new dropdown lets users check installed gateways by region. This comes with ways to share gateways and file support tickets with Microsoft.

Large models for Power BI are in-preview, going beyond the existing 10 GB limit on Power BI Premium dataset caches. Users will be able to incrementally refresh and leverage a highly compressed in-memory cache to speed up querying. The large models capability brings Power BI to parity with Azure Analysis Services, as it succeeds this older service. Among other new capabilities, users can tap into seven new data connectors including PDF, SharePoint, HDInsight and Apache Spark and employ over 40 different data transformations such as merging queries, combining files, listing transformations and filling up or down. Paginated reports which became generally available earlier this year is being shifted to support embedding, giving ISVs more flexibility adding paginated reports with Power BI APIs. Embedding works with programs like the .NET SDK or Power BI JavaScript API, with the option to tailor the data displayed by user with row-level security.

For PowerApps users, the end of October and beginning of November brought its share of announcements as well.