3 Things: Data Analytics Highlights from January 2024

9th February 2024 . By Michael A

This month's '3 Things' blog post includes topics ranging from dynamic subscriptions for Power BI reports to the stable release of Delta Lake 3.1.0. Read on as we highlight three things for each of the three technology areas that you should be aware of from last month.

Power BI


  • Dynamic subscriptions for Power BI reports is available in public preview. This new capability means you can configure Power BI reports to emailed to recipients on a regular basis with the information pre-filtered to on a per recipient basis. Learn more.

  • The Model Explorer is now available when editing semantic models in the Power BI service. This means that if you use a Mac or do not have Power BI Desktop installed, you can still perform tasks like creating calculation groups and relationships from your web browser. Learn more.

  • The public preview of Copilot in Power BI is now available worldwide. When enabled, you can ask it to help you create a report or to summarise the data on a report page to help accelerate the report building process. It is not a replacement for carefully designed Power BI reports but it does make report building more accessible within your organisation. Learn more.



Microsoft Fabric


  • The Microsoft Fabric engineering team provide some guidance on good practices when orchestrating Fabric Notebooks in Fabric Data Factory pipelines. It includes useful tips on implementing retry logic and notebook parameterisation. Learn more.

  • Copilot has quickly become ubiquitous in Microsoft Fabric. You can enable the Copilot experience for your Fabric capacities. This is great news but there is a catch: it is currently only available on capacities backed by at least an F64 or P1 SKU. Learn more.

  • The Fabric certification exam launched in beta form, and you can accelerate your path to exam readiness by making the most of the Fabric Career Hub. Learn more.



Azure Analytics and AI


  • Generative AI use cases continue to emerge at an incredible rate. But what about the privacy and security considerations? A recent article on the Azure Architecture Blog explores this crucial topic. Learn more.

  • Databricks has introduced AI model sharing through Databricks Delta Sharing and the Databricks Marketplace. This enables you to securely share and serve AI models within your organisation or externally across clouds and platforms. Learn more.

  • Delta Lake 3.1.0 landed and includes Deletion Vectors, optimised write and auto compaction, improved UniForm compatibility for Apache Iceberg, and Liquid Clustering. This is quite a big release that will enable your lakehouse do more with the same compute resources. Learn more.



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