It’s the last T-SQL Tuesday of the year, and it’s amazing to think we’ve gotten to #181. That’s over 15 years of monthly blog parties.
This month we have a slightly different invite from Kevin Chant. Kevin usually participates in the Festive Tech Calendar, which I’ve never been a part of. He wanted to combine those to together in a crossover, which is an interesting idea. I wonder how it will go.
In any case, there’s a bit of explanation, but the essential invite is this: My invitation to yourselves is to write about a Microsoft Data Platform announcement that you considered to be as amazing as a present. In other words, something which made you go “wow”.
It’s a good invite for the end of the year and my answer is below.
Think about a VCS Diff
I could say git diff since git has won the VCS battle, but in any tech work, it’s important to be able to tell what things have changed and evaluate if the change is helpful or hurtful.
Lots of tools, especially visual ones, haven’t always considered this. They’ve often built a tool that doesn’t easily make comparing code easy. The first example of this was DTS/SSIS (SQL Server Integration Services), where this was a visual tool. The configuration was stored in an XML file, but every visual change created a change in the XML, and the structure was fluid enough that it was often hard to determine what changed between versions.
Microsoft has a lot of tools that did this, including Power BI. However, a preview mode of the code was announced earlier last year. Power BI Developer mode includes Git integration. This gives us a way to edit the file as code, something that should be required of all tech tools. The visual stuff is great, but give us a code option.
You can enable this in the PBI Desktop options.
To me, this is fantastic as it enables this to really work as a code tool, which it is. More importantly, as we get changes made by Copilot or other AIs, we need to easily see the differences that exist between versions. That’s important for troubleshooting and governance.
To me, getting a Power BI project file that works in a VCS is a great present.