One of the more interesting announcements at Ignite 2024 was the sneak peek of ‘Translytical’ (@43:20) features in Power BI. According to Amir Netz, the CTO of Fabric (who, by the way, invented the VertiPaq engine that powers Power BI and other Microsoft products), this is the biggest update to Power BI since its inception. Or even bigger.

A couple of years ago I started to notice that fulfilling basic reporting needs in businesses was no longer enough. Many needs required two-way communication with the data. Typical cases included annotating an outlier in production data, perhaps shown in control charts; fixing classifications of an ML-model; re-running an ML-model; or just updating the data. This was possible before but it required for example embedding a Power App application into the report and setting up and configuring an external database.

I guess the need for interacting with data instead of just looking it was recognized by Microsoft, too. With these ‘Translytical’ features, data can be updated by using a Fabric database, user data functions, and Power BI button. No more external resources. Much simpler!

Updating analytical data can be a massive footgun, and you need to carefully design all the whats, whens, and whos, but the demand for this kind of feature is strong.

I am not yet sure about the term ‘Translytical’, but I see huge potential with this feature. We can see that large part of the small scale business apps will be built on Fabric in the future. It is possible that Power BI and Fabric will start expanding into the field that was once held by Access and Excel.

The feature is in private preview so we don’t know all the details or possibilities yet, but I am interested to see how this plays out and to what extent the border of transactional and analytical boundaries will be blurred in the future.

Exciting times!

Btw, if you are interested in listening the amazing story of Amir Netz and Vertipaq, you should listen this episode of Insights Tomorrow podcast.