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Microsoft Power BI Updates Blog

Power BI Service and Mobile July 2019 feature summary

Headshot of article author Nikhil Gaekwad

Senior Product Manager, Power BI
11 August, 2019

It’s time again to recap the major features and announcements we made in the Power BI service and mobile for the month of July. Here’s a rundown of what we’ll be covering:

Support for non-premium datasets for Paginated reports

We kicked off July by dropping the latest update to Power BI Report Builder in the download center. It includes, for the first time, the ability to connect to your Power BI datasets, regardless of them being backed by premium capacity. Yes, that’s right! It means any Power BI Pro user can connect to and author, render and export reports locally against any Power BI datasets with the Power BI Report Builder. Learn more

General availability of Power BI aggregations

We announced the general availability (GA) of Power BI aggregations – one of the biggest scalability features we have in the Microsoft BI stack. Aggregations empower organizations to enable every user to perform their own analysis atop full fidelity, petabyte scale datasets. At the same time, those organizations now have better control over their BI architecture, striking a better balance between cost, performance, and data fidelity. In addition, we announced that aggregations can be used for enterprise-grade semantic models in large organizations with fine-grain security requirements by leveraging Power BI’s row level security feature (RLS). Learn more

July update for the On-premises data gateway

We released an updated version of Power BI On-premises data gateway for the month of July. The latest version has an updated mashup engine, update to the .Net Framework, and a bug fix to the encrypted connection. Check it out by installing the new gateway or learn more from the announcement blog.

Send refresh failure notifications to others

We added a new feature under Scheduled Refresh where you can specify additional users and email-enabled groups to receive the refresh failure notifications in addition to the dataset owner. Sending refresh notifications to others can deliver significant value, enabling you to monitor your scheduled refreshes more reliably and more effortlessly than before. Check it out for yourself or learn more.

Power BI Premium capacity load testing tool

To help you understand how much user load your Power BI Premium capacities can handle when being used, we introduced a new load testing tool that will help you create automated load tests against your capacities, and lets you choose which reports to test and how many concurrent users to simulate. The tool will generate load on a capacity of choice by continuously rendering each report with new filter values (to prevent unrealistically good performance due to report caching) until the token required for authenticating the tool against the service expires. To host the tool and other future tools and utilities, we also established a new GitHub repository. The entire repository is Open Source and users are welcomed to contribute by adding new tools for improving existing ones. Learn more

Service availability notifications (Preview)

To help you stay on top of Power BI service availability, we launched a new feature that you can opt-in to receive email notifications when there is a service disruption or degradation. While Power BI’s 99.9% SLA makes these occurrences rare, we added this functionality to ensure that you are covered even for those rare events. As a tenant administrator, you can create a security group with all the users that will should these notifications. Learn more

New Look (Preview) in the Power BI service

We refreshed the user interface of the Power BI service and introduced an opt-in ‘new look’ experience that’s simpler and builds on customers’ familiarity with Microsoft products. This initial release has updates to the report viewing experience, and there’s more to come in the upcoming months. Check out the announcement blog to learn about how to opt-in and try it out for yourself. Don’t forget to give us your feedback!

New Power BI region in South Africa

We expanded Power BI to add first available region in Africa, the South Africa North region, located in Johannesburg! With the addition of this new region, Power BI is now available in 19 regions in our global public cloud, in addition to six regions in our three national clouds, Power BI for US Government, Power BI Germany, and Power BI in China (operated by 21Vianet). You can immediately leverage these by deploying your Power BI Multi-Geo Premium capacity. Learn more

Report page tooltips on Power BI Mobile

Finally, we brought more parity to the report consumption experience on mobile by adding tooltips! Now, you just need to simply press and hold on a visual that has a report tooltip tied to it and the tooltip will be shown. Try it for yourself!

Roadmap updates

We use the Power BI section in the Business Application Release Notes to share details on what’s coming in the next three to six months.  These release notes are updated weekly with details on shipping dates, screenshots, and new announcements. Here’s what we disclosed recently: