Newsletter #300 is a significant milestone for SQLBI: it marks nearly 12 years of sending our updates every two weeks. I thought this was a good time to clarify SQLBI’s position on a topic we haven’t discussed much yet: Artificial…  Read more

When I presented “Choosing Between Import Mode, Direct Lake, and Composite Models” at Fabric Conf 2025 in Las Vegas, the room overflowed, and the session was not recorded. I promised to publish the material once the new Direct Lake + Import composite model…  Read more

We released a new course for our SQLBI+ subscribers: Security in Tabular Semantic Models. This course explains how to implement security in Tabular semantic models, considering different requirements, data model design, DAX implementation, and performance. The training is reference material…  Read more

I usually do not write about announcements and new features until we have had time to try and test them in the real world. However, there are always exceptions, and some of the announcements at the Microsoft Fabric Conference 2025…  Read more

As one of the founders of OKVIZ—a company dedicated to producing custom visuals—I have been following the recent developments in Power BI Desktop with particular concern. This issue, however, extends beyond our company and affects many other organizations that rely…  Read more

After another year, it is time to recap what happened in the DAX and SQLBI worlds and provide a few spoilers about 2025!  Read more

We released more content in SQLBI+ with two new sessions: Introducing Visual Calculations in Power BI: This two-hour session introduces the Visual Calculations feature in Power BI, which is still in preview. We plan to update the “Understanding Visual Calculations…  Read more

No, this is not the end-of-the-year blog post about what happened in 2024: There is still more than one month to go! However, we are receiving many requests asking what we are working on at SQLBI. I wanted to write…  Read more

In the mass of announcements made at Microsoft Ignite, I want to mention the SQL database in Fabric, which finally closes a gap we had in Power BI for many years. In May 2022, Microsoft launched Power BI Datamarts in…  Read more

I am proud to announce the second version of the Contoso Data Generator! In January 2022, we released the first version of an open-source project to create a sample relational database for semantic models in Power BI and Analysis Services.…  Read more