Fabric Community Conference 2024: Microsoft Plans Copilot, Data Engineering Enhancements for Power BI

Microsoft communicated four promises at last week’s Fabric Community Conference 2024, and one of them, the empowerment of business users, will focus on advances in Power BI alongside other analytical, lake-centric, and AI-related investments.

Since the launch of Fabric, Power BI’s customer base has only continued its rapid rise, according to Microsoft. The product will reach its nine-year anniversary in a few months and now has more than 350,000 customers, 6.5 million developers, and “tens of millions” of users across more than 210 countries. 

Lakehouse capabilities

Power BI’s future will be closely related to data engineering capabilities around the lakehouse, Microsoft said. It will soon support Fabric’s CI/CD capabilities with access to Spark jobs, warehouses, and notebooks. Workspaces, where Power BI users collaborate and create collections of report-related outputs, will also eventually support task flows, a capability that has not yet arrived in public preview, to allow different approaches to structuring and managing the workspace. 

Semantic models will also be getting enhancements like the much-requested incremental refresh activity for dataflows. While it is not yet in public preview, this feature will eventually be available from data pipelines, giving users the ability to create, update, and refresh data from one place.

Power BI’s semantic model tools in combination with Direct Lake mode “is so strategic for [Microsoft],” said Christian Wade, group product manager at Microsoft in a Power BI roadmap presentation at the event. “The investments that we're making in OneLake [include] the ability for Direct Lake mode to work without a dependency on the warehouse or lakehouse. This changes quite a lot. You will be able to access data from any of the OneLake sources that create and generate Delta data in Parquet form… This will be a common use of direct lake in the future.”