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Announcing public preview of automatic aggregations!

Headshot of article author Christian Wade

With exponential growth in data volumes and complexity, Power BI customers demand enterprise BI solutions that scale to petabytes, are secure, easy to manage, and accessible to all users across the largest organizations. Following the announcement from the Microsoft Build conference, automatic aggregations in Power BI Premium are now in public preview! Unlock massive datasets without having to copy large volumes of data or manage data loads. Automatic aggregations are managed automatically by Power BI, accelerating time to insight, and reducing TCO.

Most BI queries are aggregated in nature. Therefore, if you cache data at the aggregated level, you will see a high rate of return in terms of boosting query performance, whilst minimizing data duplication. Most user-generated queries benefit from blazing-fast aggregated caches. If users interacting with Power BI reports generate detail queries, the system transparently retrieves data directly from the data source. This is a very economical and effective way to unlock big data for interactive analysis.

Aggregated caches and queries

Until now, aggregations require query-optimization skills to set up and maintain. Today, we are removing this limitation. With automatic aggregations, Power BI will analyze query logs to automatically create and manage aggregations as an AI-driven system. By simply enabling the feature, Power BI will optimize performance and adapt to new usage patterns, so you don’t have to. At launch, automatic aggregations work with Azure Synapse Analytics, Snowflake and Google BigQuery and we intend to expand the list of supported data sources in the future.

Automatic aggregations are based on the existing aggregations feature, which is an established feature used by countless Power BI customers including Walmart. Chris Wagner, Analytics Architect at Rockwell Automation took part in the private preview of automatic aggregations and states that it can “unlock our largest datasets by simply clicking a toggle!”

We could not be more excited about automatic aggregations and can’t wait to hear your feedback. To learn more, see the documentation at https://aka.ms/AutomaticAggregations and watch the demonstration at 23 minutes of the Microsoft Business Applications Summit 2021 session: Power BI – Peek into the future (part 2): Analytics for everyone. Don’t forget to check out the “beautiful lift chart”, which you can use to see how much automatic aggregations is boosting query performance across your organization!