Just in time for Christmas the Microsoft product teams responsible for Power BI have a slew of amazing updates. The list of updates can be found here but for my notes specifically on Power Query updates continue reading!
Power Query
Power Query now has 3 new data sources that you can connect to. Connectors have now been added for Sybase IQ, Exchange and Dynamics CRM Online. Sybase IQ is the column-store database technology produced by SAP and is used for many organizations for BI solutions. This is a great add for Microsoft to pull in competitors data sources. The addition of Exchange was a bit of a surprise to me at first but once I saw my first demo connecting to an Exchange email account I was pretty impressed what you could do with it. Expect a blog post on this one soon. Last, Dynamic CRM Online is likely to be very interesting to many organizations. My company uses Dynamics and having the ability to easily pull data from it into a self service solution is a huge win.
Power Query can now automatically detects database relationships. This functionality has existed in other Microsoft technologies including Power Pivot but now is available in Power Query too.
In the November release of Power Query the Query Editor ribbon was introduced. Now the Query Editor ribbon has additional buttons for Fill Down, Sort Ascending/Descending and Number Transformations. The Fill Down function is a really cool M query function that I demoed in this whitepaper.
In addition to these, several new features have been added in regards to sharing organizational queries:
- The Replace Shared query has been removed.
- You can now Share your query from the Query fly-out
- A new Certified button was added to the Search ribbon, enabling Search result to only show Certified results.
