Like SQL Data Warehouse, Microsoft once again named a product by what it does: Power BI Datamart. It is an Azure SQL database, with a visual query designer so users don’t need to write SQL to get the data out to BI tools, Excel or ML algorithms. It also generates a Power BI dataset automatically, which we can use to create Power BI reports.

Loading data into Datamart

Power BI Datamart uses a built-in Power BI Dataflow for loading data into it. After we create a Datamart, we click on Get Data and use PowerQuery to connect to various data sources such as Azure SQL database, Azure Data Lake Storage, Databricks (Spark), Azure Synapse, HDInsight, Sharepoint, Excel files, text files, JSON files, Parquet files, API, Salesforce, Snowflake, Redshift, BigQuery, Oracle DB, IBM DB2, Teradata, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Access, SAP, Analysis Services and ODBC (link):

The above list of data…

In the year 2001 after my Master Degree in Computer Engineering I joined a new team inside my company of that time (located in Turin) that had assigned a very exciting project: moving a big distributed application for the cinema industry written in Visual Basic 6 and with SQL Server as backend to a new distributed architecture based on .NET 1.0 and web services.

I remember that we started this very big project (big names of the cinema industry were impacted by this new redesign) asking directly to Microsoft for some consultations on how to handle the software architecture design at best (how to design at best the application layer, data layer, database access, web service layer and so on). An year later I had the pleasure to manage this team and about 1.5 years later the project had the go-live phase. But that’s another story.

From that time, I…

Over the past few days, I attended the Power BI Next Step conference in Lego land – Denmark. During the keynote, Will Thompson – PM on the Power BI team, showed a new DAX function that is available to all of us already, but was very well hidden in the latest builds of Power BI Desktop. This new function, called OFFSET, allows us to do in context comparisons between two values, without writing extremely lengthy and complex DAX.

I gave it a go and in this post I share my first experiences with this new function and how I think this will make our life easier!

The first post after my vacation. I was in doubt for a while whether I should write this one or not… given the preview state. Since one of the customers I work for asked me for advise today about Power BI Datamarts, I thought lets do it! They convinced me that it would be a valuable blog for many. I hope for you too.

What is this blog about? I will explain my first experiences with Power BI Datamarts which is currently in preview state. I will elaborate on my test cases, the value I see in Datamarts but also some open ends and where you can potentially position it in your Power BI solution architecture.