welcome to this February edition of the fellow mind fabric frenzy I'm Yan I'm Jacob and we have the pleasure of presenting a lot of new releases for you from the febru February long list of February releases for fabric harbi and it's a big one it's a big one so we have a tight schedule very tight yeah indeed thank you for joining us um we we've got a couple of things on the agenda today um we've got a coverage of some of the new releases where we will be sort of doing a quick rundown on some of the features that we've Cherry Picked from this release and then we've got a couple of uh highlights with some DBT and you will be showing some calculations calculation groups groups oh yeah and that's a big one everybody's looking forward to that so let's get on with it well like I said today's agenda the new releases we've got a spotlight on DBT and fabric we've got a demo of the calculation groups in PBI and the trick of the month um I will not say anymore at this point but it's uh MS it's a Hidden Gem all right excellent let's get started with it visual calculations oh yeah visual calculations is uh something that we've been waiting for for years years and it's finally here and um I will dive into my poia and show you a really quick demo of the new visual um calculations um so when you see this uh report on my powerbi desktop um you might notice that I have this um this uh table at the bottom and I can now with a new visual uh calculations create a new calculation like this and I can start working within the table um and uh everyone that's familiar with Dax know how insanely difficult it is to uh work with row context and this is the row context of a uh table and I can write a measure in here and I can say the profit is the sales oop sales minus the cost and there we go and voila VOA I have a whole new column that's calculated from my table and um The Joy doesn't stop here uh we because we can do some things that uh used to be very difficult um so let me show you um if we have a um uh sales compared to yesterday double I can't spell but you you'll forgive me won't you all right two oh I spell better when I can see my screen yesterday and here we go um I can add one of these new functions um for instance versus previous and this will give me the um the uh context of the row before so I can say uh what's my uh sales total sales minus my previous total sales and I can add this boom okay what a horrible demo if I go into this one I can edit my calculation and okay it's because of the scrolling I couldn't see it but it was actually there wonderful so this is something that used to be very very difficult inside uh um inside powerbi so it's there and uh it's really easy to work with and we have all these new functions um that you can see by pressing the FX and um I just love it and I hope uh everyone will Embrace this new feature looks very intuitive actually it is yeah great next one up Dynamic subscriptions for palbi reports another welcome feature ex really um it's something that uh many customers have uh have been asking for over the years it was something that we have in uh report had in reporting Services uh back in the days but uh but now we uh we can actually um send uh a distribute reports that are filtered by some sort of context and uh maybe if you all like a demo of this one we'll do it but we haven't got the time today sure enough um said well one thing though um we can for instance send uh uh reports that are filtered by our salespersons uh uh what are the sales from last week or we can send U reports that are filtered by something like uh why haven't they sold enough something like that yeah it's really useful and uh I'm sure the community will like it I'm I'm sure it will be embraced by users yeah so what's up what's up okay the measure descriptions with co-pilot um I am a developer and I do not like to document anything um but now luckily first developer I've heard that saying that yeah now um prob can help me document if I SE a measure I can go into the uh model view and select a measure and open the property Pane and click co-pilot of course this is a very simple measure um and it's not working with very complex measures yet but I'm sure it'll get there but I uh press the co-al button and I got this description profit measure calculates the profits by subtracting the total cost from the toal total sales and I'll keep it and now my powerbi um measure will be updated with this description isn't that neat really neat I think it is and a great example of how the co-pilot features are creeping into almost anything we do oh yeah with Microsoft projects these days we'll be out of a job in no time hopefully not next one up is Dax query viiew improvements yeah um so uh we've had the Dax query review for some time um and uh this is also something that I think we should do a demo of one day um but um but the Dax query view does a lot of uh uh uh the things that we had to do in uh uh daak Studio but now we can do it in uh now we can actually write and debug our decks directly in powerbi and uh it's gotten a little better and we've gotten these new uh info functions um that I'm very curious to see what right what what kind of information we can uh we can use that for in the future um but they're not documented de but it sounds exciting thank you Microsoft well next one up oh yeah is another enhancement to the collaboration features that have been sort of developing in the PBI space tmdl and yeah how do you pronounce that tmdl timle timle yeah for short all right well talking about collaboration do you fancy a game of PX tennis oh yes I do uh I think most developers actually don't but I think you're all pretty well aware of the some of the obstacles that we meet when we are collaborating on the same reports or semantic models uh working with powerbi files M uh I start out doing something I send it to you and you put your work into it and then we save at the same time and then we save it at the same time and yeah then things get lost well this situation actually improved quite a bit with the um with the introduction of the p project files yes um and they introduced adjacent format for the uh RBI wonderful Jason as I always say yeah you just love editing directly in Jason files I do yeah if you like that um but there's been a further enhancement to that with the uh tblo model definition language which is introduced as a preview feature this introduces um sort of a better I know you really like reading Json files but it introduces a new and more readable format uh for the uh semantic models and the contents of those uh So you you're actually able to see perhaps you can see on the screen here that the you've got sort of better A lot better styling of the of the document it's more readable uh and it's actually also editable in external editors yeah yeah very exciting so now we can actually work on the same powerbi file at the same time work y you can work on you can actually collaborate on the same powerbi files um and there's an extension out for visual studio code where you can uh work with these uh tmdl files I can't wait to get started no I bet you can't um as for now you can actually save this is a preview feature that feature that you can um select in the PBI MH version you can also choose to save your PBI files as in the new tmdl format but once you do that it's irreversible you can't go back to the old project file format uh so unless you have a copy um so strongly suggest it to take copies of your files when working with it it sounds like something I've heard before yeah uh it never happened to you though no no sorry right next one up is the customization navigation pain oh yes um the customization navigation pain is um really just uh a nice to have um if if you show my screen I will do a quick demonstration really it's just a matter of editing the buttons you have on the left side of the screen so I can unpin my apps and my metrics and all sorts of um uh uh buttons that I used to have and uh if I want them back I can click down here on the dots and get them back uh wonderful feature for uh working on Tiny screens I guess yeah and also I think recognizable if you're working with Visual Studio code where you've got pretty much the same indeed and and I'm sure that there are buttons on this uh left side of the screen that no one use that yeah someone don't use all the time yeah so more customiz say will use their experience indeed focus on what's important yep next one up is one of our highlights DBT DBT and Microsoft fabric back in August 2023 I was here uh and we introduced the DBT core integration with Microsoft fabric um at that time I showed a demo on how to use the DBT core feature which is essentially a python library that you download and run uh uh en code the extensions for uh locally on your machine and when you deploy it if you want to deploy it you can actually deploy it in a virtual environment or through some sort of virtualization in uh kubernets or something like that um very interesting um it introduces a more developer uh specific workflow for working with uh a lot of the ETL processing uh setting up your models uh and working with them you have to sort of get used to working with your SQL code in a slightly different or altered form uh what's the abbreviation here um the abbreviation for the file names is actually or the abbreviation for DBT yeah all right it's it's the abbreviation for DBT or the DBT abbreviation is actually uh data Built tool data build tool yeah so what this is actually a development platform where you can sort of uh set up the code for your models um you can work with different sort of abstractions uh within the code you can have um it's based on a templating language uh most python uh developers are probably familiar with the library called uh Ginger uh so it's template based and you can actually sort of enhance uh templates you can inherit from other templates uh when you use it um DBT has been used in a lot of I think people coming from a snowflake back background on uh something like that has probably been working with DBT uh throughout a longer time uh but the integration is available now uh for fabric as well uh either through the DBT core which we introduced uh in August and this is not really a release for the February release it's actually just a catchup of something happened in November last year uh but uh Microsoft and DBT has introduced a new feature uh on the DBT Cloud platform where you can now integrate with uh your fabric uh environment excellent so you get the ssas experience from DBT Cloud uh which is a cloudbased uh platform for developing uh and sched in and running the uh buildings uh the builds of the um the projects so you get um sort of a more unified experience and if you're not coming from a specific developer background uh you can you can sort of collaborate uh with other developers in the same Cloud platform um and it's very expensive right not really but it is more expensive than the corv version which is actually free okay but uh I've just made a quick rundown of some of the some of the a quick comparison of the two platforms um both of them are actually built on the same code base uh DBT core um when it comes to the deployment of of uh the code that you're working with uh the cloud version is a SAS solution uh so it's a fully packaged solution when you're working with DBT core it's a local or virtualized environment that you're working in you can develop locally and you can deploy to a virtualized platform where you can run uh your builds ah yep as for the user user interfaces you get uh a full browser Ed experience with the SAS platform uh the cloud platform when you're working with the core version you're working with more of a command line interface and python code does this mean that I have to uh reinstall Visual Studio on my uh laptop uh not when you're working with the DBT Cloud you can work directly in the cloud environment good stuff so no need for development tools locally on your own machine um sorry just a quick run down a [Laughter] the somebody is actually ready around with the let's try and see if we can stay here yeah right as for the scalability the obviously when you're on the SAS platform you've got uh High scale ability uh it's a cloud cloud cloudbased platform um if you're working with DBT core well you're pretty much on your own you have to set up every uh running environment yourself uh so obviously you've got restrictions in terms of the resources you've got available um with the cloud experience you get automatic updates of the codebase uh where you are sort of yeah you are sort of stuck with with separate versions when you're working with the core versions you download a specific version of the DBT core and work with that one of the greatest features probably about the DBT Cloud environment and is that you've got a full you've got fully fully SC or fully available you uh environment for working with scheduling and running your builds which is something you have to initiate manually on the DBT core platform or if you are yeah if you if you feel brave enough you can start working with tools like uh Apache airflow or Daxter to orchestrate uh your builds uh on the cloud on sorry on the core platform you say all these wonderful words I know uh with the DBT Cloud you also get the integrated uh CI capabilities which are not really available for DBT core you have to set everything up um on your own when you're on the cloud version you get official support from uh people behind DBT uh with DBT core you're stuck with the community and everything you can learn yourself okay um I like support yeah true um especially if you're running Enterprise Solutions it's a normally a great thing to have as for the customization level well the customization level or the extendability of the cloud platform obviously being a SAS platform is lower than it is on a core platform again it's essentially a python Library you can extend it um and the greatest difference of course is that if you want to use it in a production environment there's a cost uh for running the cloud version uh currently it's listed at uh $100 a month covering one project up to eight developers and 15,000 build okay that's not too expensive so it's not too expensive that was a quick rundown of the core versus Cloud hopefully one day we can make a demo of the cloud environment in integration with fabric I'd love to come back and do that I think many of us will actually uh yeah love that um could you go back to the um to the slides of uh of the uh of the features we can inde okay so uh a few more things that we uh that we that we got this month and I know stuff on the on the right side of the screen that's uh that's technical but uh but anyways uh we do have the domains in one Lake and we had a chat about those yeah um domains is a thing that they uh shipped over the last year so the I think domains have actually been available in a preview uh for quite some time uh they' recently introduced the uh subdomains as well so now you've got uh several levels of uh domains that you can work with in your basically when you are restricting access to uh your fabric environments uh you've got multiple multiple layers uh where you can actually work with your um your access to different layers of the platform so domains is a way of uh ordering your workspace organizing your working your work and now you have sub domains yep you've got domains and subdomains do you think there would be sub subdomains in the future probably okay and uh what else did we have um wait sorry yeah we had the git integration yeah and I actually had quite high hopes for the git integration yeah um when they started talking about the GD G the G integration I I was hoping that it would fix some of the issues that we had with the fabric of uh of not being able to uh to distribute properly and move toward yeah between different repositories or truncating stuff true yeah this is actually this release is actually um support for the fabric uh rest or G insiration rest API so you can you can use the rest API through either Powershell or I think if youve guty enough you can also try python code to work with the um Integrations for the rest API and probably um hopefully I haven't looked into it much but I'll try and and investigate further on it to see if it actually solves some of the problems we seems to be having with or some of the difficulties that we have with working uh with repositories and fabric that that's on your side of the table I'll take that and um and then we had a a lot of uh uh uh real-time analytics and uh that's all wonderful and then we had at the bottom something that uh uh made my toes tingle okay great uh the uh data flow Gen 2 talking about data flow gen to is all then we're talking about something good right yeah and uh and then we had the co-pilot in the data flow which was kind of a very interesting for me because I I was very fond of the uh uh creating columns by example in the in the power query uh experience and I was hoping to get that with a bit of co-pilot on top and uh and I think that's where they're going with it uh but uh we'll see we'll see in a few months once they uh uh uh get the uh uh Corners uh probably sure a bit yet yeah yeah right and then and then and then then we have the floor is yours I think yeah then we have on um on by a customer request I promised to do a quick demonstration of calculation groups in powerbi and this is something really good because we always had to use tablet editor which is a wonderful tool um but not very user friendly and uh and and we had to use that if we wanted to create calculation groups and it is an external tool it's an external Tool uh there's a free version that you can use um and of course there's a paid version um but the free version would give you calculation groups um and I'll explain what they are yeah but but um but now we have that feature built into the desktop experience which is awesome mind buckling it's awesome so uh let me demonstrate um I uh cheated a bit and um built some of it in advance because we have a very limited time very very limited time if I go into the model view of my desktop you can see that I have the tables and I have the model section on the right side of my screen in here I have calculation groups and I can create calculation groups by clicking new calculation group and I have already created one calculation group called time intelligence that has um two measures inside that uses the selected measure function yeah the selection the selected measure function will reference uh any measure in its context um and I created a very simple last year uh function around the uh selected measure and I also did a total year to date and then I also made a another calculator group called relationships and uh inside that I had three measures that basically um shifted the the uh connections between tables with the function of use relationship uh when you have a inactive relationship you use use relation to activate it true yeah and uh and I created that basically three measures quite identical uh in at least in the pattern so once I had these uh measure groups I could use them in my powerbi report um if you look at my uh uh Matrix visual here I have really basic uh um reporting measures total sales total profit it these are some functions and you can see them in my base measure uh uh um um folder over here and I can then create a slicer where I drag in my relationship and I can use that to filter my my uh uh total sales and profit measures or or not filter but change the context change the context yeah of these new relationships and I can even use this active relationship in inside my um inside my visual if I put it in the column and maybe I remove the uh and I deselect the due date like so you see I have the three columns of um of total sales in the uh uh with the the various um uh um user relations so you get the pivot pivot results I think exactly and I also created another calculation group with the uh uh uh last year and year to date and this could be any type of uh time intelligence um and I can select those and I can have the year-to date and my total sales and my profit will follow the new uh business logic and I can combine these two and use them together and I could have had more measures uh or more calculation groups I could have had uh uh conditional formatting of cells in my Matrix I could have had uh uh um uh formatting of currencies uh of various types and and just select them with a slicer this is amazing yeah and really great stuff that is now Incorporated within powerbi itself and it is visually available useful I should have had an hour uh to present this in in in further detail it is wonderful um great well that was go to the last it's very important we need need to have the last one um there we go Max so as a new feature uh in this uh uh uh fabric frenzy we will suggest a new um idea um from the idea board um where users go and just an idea and other users vote for them and Microsoft is actually pretty good at prioritizing their development of p in um Symphony with this uh uh user priorit and user suggestions um so that is really a good chance to get your voice heard yeah and uh of course we have a a suggestion and we will put those in the chat below yeah the YouTube uh video great stuff well we're running a little over time thank you for joining us we hope you found this useful and we look forward to seeing you again byebye bye that