Microsoft Power BI users warned over pace of Fabric migration As Microsoft Build in Seattle kicks off today, one analyst has pointed out that the Redmond software giant is giving users scant time to get off its popular BI system and re-implement their solutions. Microsoft announced its new analytics platform Fabric in June last year, and added data mirroring features in November. If …
We are still on SSRS (reporting services), as we must not do cloud, and all interesting stuff in PowerBI is cloud only (so.... f' them).
I have a project (ok, a side project) to move over to time series DBs and Grafana. There are a couple of people in the department that hate me for this, but those are idiots anyway, and their plan will fail (they are idiots - who have no clue). Or maybe I'll jump ship. Meh.
I had the 'pleasure' of having to make some Power BI reports recently. Half of the tools feel like they are not finished, the other half seem to have 'soon to be deprecated' warnings. In some parts of the 365 cloud Microsoft are coopting "move fast and break things". I'm guessing the devs that could make the tools mature and reliable are busy stuffing copilot into every hole. In my case, if you want to make a report using Excel as your data source, then you get some pretty cool web-based report design tools. If you want to make a proper report with a database as the source (sorry 'The Dataverse') then you have to use their "Power BI Report Builder", which is a half desktop app/half thin client weird port of the BI tools from Studio. It has some of the Studio tools but not all of them and the ones that are there don't work half as well. As an experienced SSRS user it took twice as long to make the reports with Power BI and they were not as feature-rich. One issue is that as the 'app' is a thin client for the Power BI website you have to deal with an Edge pop-up for the Microsoft Account login seemingly every time you want to preview a report, with apparently no way to 'remember me'. The cloud still has a long long way to go to match on-premises for basic stuff like this.
So let me get this timeline straight:
In 2016 we had Azure SQL Data Warehouse, which got rebranded in 2019 to Azure Synapse Analytics, which in 2023 got reengineered and reimagined into Microsoft Fabric.
But you can still use Azure Synapse Analytics, Azure Databricks, and Azure Data Factory, etc. But the new cool stuff will now be in Fabric. And if you were unfortunate enough to use features in PowerBI that are not deemed cool anymore then you need to migrate. Pronto!
Have I got that right?
Fabric users can create a Web or REST connection to an external web server and pump all of your data to it, or to any cloud service really. There isnt a way to stop that. So if someone wants to go rogue, they can go completely rogue and you won't even know because the Fabric logging is a nightmare to access.
Fabric can only ever be on or off. MS give you zero ability to restrict the things that can do the above to certain users. It's either users can use ALL fabric components, or they can use none.
But MS don't care. They provide you with little governance so they can cause organic (read metastatic) growth in your organisation that then forces you to buy lots of expensive capacity. You can't even stop users from uploading data to their own workspaces which admins can barely access.
"It's either users can use ALL fabric components, or they can use none."
Ok. That's just... no. No way. I'm currently doing some experiments using RShiny, which is cool if you like R, and sucks if you are a mouse jockey, and I want to take a look at time series databases, like InfluxDB, which might actually be a sensible way forward (we are dealing mostly with time series data), and combine that with Grafana. Let's see. Micros~1 can just bugger off. Shame some of the younger people in my org seem wed to their products, and not really able to change. I could be their father (yes, I am now apparently old), and I am more open to change, more open to trying new ways of organising work / workflows, more eager to learn new stuff... o tempora, o mores
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