If you missed out on the big announcement last week about Tabular Model Definition Language and the future of Power BI version control at SQLBits last week, then the recording of the session has already been published:
If you’re a professional Power BI developer you must watch this one! Mathias Thierbach (of https://pbi.tools/ fame) has also published the slides here.
This is just the beginning of a much better story for pro-developers in Power BI…
Hi Chris, Why doesn’t Microsoft ever lead the charge in these areas? It is always a bit tiresome to hear about yet another “home-grown” solution to an obvious problem or limitation in the core product.
It is pretty impressive that members of the community invest so much effort into the peripheral tooling for Power BI. Given the investment, there are lots of Power BI fans. But I think this would increase ten-fold if the core product was ever to be open sourced. From my own perspective it doesn’t really make sense for anyone to contribute in an open-source way, considering the proprietary nature of the underlying product.
Setting aside the obvious need for version control, there are other limitations with CI/CD that are equally problematic for us and the community cannot help with all of them. Eg. the deployment REST API’s for the Power BI service are very problematic . Last month Microsoft decided to stop supporting a REST api that allows customers to update a “dataflow” definition (from a json). This removal of support took place, despite the fact that there are numerous blogs and github examples that have already been shared with the community. I opened a support ticket about the misbehaving API and, next thing you know, the related PMs (three of them) decided to start deleting all the documentation & references that describe the mechanism that was put in place for dataflow deployments!
To be clear: this isn’t a community, home-grown solution. This is a 100% native feature of the product. Mathias worked on it as part of the Power BI community contributor programme, which allows non-Microsoft employees to work on Power BI features.
Thanks Chris,
As an old-school MSFT BI developer, I’ll start to believe that Microsoft has put their full weight behind this after we see the update for SSDT-BI-in-VS-2022, and it starts writing my project outputs to TMDL files, instead of a BIM. 😉
I’m guessing that is still a year or two away. On the other hand, maybe “SSDT-BI” is going to die off before first (and maybe it will take out AAS at the same time?) It has been challenging for pro-developers to see where these things are headed. At least Microsoft seems to be acknowledging that we exist once again. 😉
Hopefully PBI-Desktop can also “spit out” the TMDL at some point, if only as a by-product of the PBIX. But Gabi wouldn’t identify any Microsoft tool that would support the language, so I’m assuming that even the PBI-Desktop may not have support right away either.
Thanks again for sharing this, and for your part in all of it. TMDL sounds like it will be a very welcome addition. It reminds me a little of my MDX scripts for multidimensional cubes! And I expect that it will make me a lot more productive than I am now (no more need for bouncing back and forth between PBI desktop and tabular editor).
One last thing to mention on this: I can’t claim any credit for any of this, I had nothing to do with the implementation or design. All I’m doing is trying to raise awareness!
This TMDL can’t come soon enough. Not to state the obvious, but it will be so nice to be able to use “find-in-files” to search for previous samples of a DAX or PQ! I can’t say how many times I’ve had to wait for an instance of PBI desktop to open, simply in order to find a tiny snippet of my code to copy from.
Sometimes I can’t quite remember which PBIX had my DAX (eg. in a calculation group) …. so I end up opening more than one of them, and then must ALSO open up Tabular Editor as well before I’ve finally reached the three lines of code that I needed to copy!
Thank you for sharing this informative post on the latest announcements from SQLBits about Power BI TMDL and version control. It’s great to see the continued development of Power BI and how it can be used in various industries. Looking forward to learning more about these features and their benefits.
Thanks Chris, is their any relation with the Power BI license model involved? (only Premium,…?)
It is Premium only, yes
Hi, the link to the slides does not work. It is an empty repository. Are you able to re-upload or share privately please?