What’s the Mashup Engine?

I was testing something the other day and ran sp_who2 on a test instance. I saw this in the program listing:

I had never seen the Mashup Engine listed in a program list, and I certainly don’t have any program installed by that name.

Or do I?

I actually do. It’s embedded in Excel 2016, as part of Power Query. Fellow MVP, Reza Rad, has a good introduction to what this actually is. Apparently it’s the engine that makes it easy for data movement and transformation. Kind of an SSIS light, that’s a part of Power BI as well.

If you see this on your instance, you’ll know that someone is connecting with another tool. As to which one it is, that might be harder to determine.