Learn more about FabCon and SQLCon 2026
The excitement surrounding this event reflects the same momentum we’re seeing across our data portfolio. Just two and a half years after Microsoft Fabric reached general availability, it’s already serving more than 31,000 customers and remains the fastest-growing data platform in Microsoft’s history. Fortune 500 companies like The Coca-Cola Company are already using Fabric at scale across their organizations.

Microsoft Fabric is helping us evolve our data foundation into a more unified, AI-ready platform. Combined with Power BI and capabilities like Fabric IQ, it enables the enterprise to turn data into intelligence and act on it faster.

Shekhar Gowda, Vice President of Global Marketing Technologies at The Coca-Cola Company
Our databases are accelerating just as quickly, with SQL Server 2025 growing more than twice as fast as the previous version.

Today, we’re thrilled to share how we are bringing the power of databases and Fabric together to form a truly converged data platform—one that unifies transactional, operational, and analytical data under a single, consistent architecture. I’ll also highlight how we’ve enhanced Fabric to help you transform data into the semantic knowledge AI needs to understand your business, powered by Fabric IQ and Power BI’s industry-leading semantic model technology.

Introducing the Database Hub in Microsoft Fabric
Databases sit at the heart of the enterprise data estate—a system of record powering applications, transactions, and mission‑critical insights. Yet as organizations scale across cloud, on‑premises, and edge environments, database estates have become increasingly fragmented and isolated. As AI places even greater demands on data estates, unifying databases under a single access point and control plane has become essential.

To address this challenge, Fabric is expanding its role as the central access point for enterprise data with the Database Hub in Fabric, now available in early access. Database Hub in Fabric provides a unified database management experience that brings together databases across edge, cloud, and Fabric into a single, coherent view. Teams now have one place to explore, observe, govern, and optimize their entire database estate—including Azure SQL, Azure Cosmos DB, Azure Database for PostgreSQL, SQL Server (enabled by Azure Arc), Azure Database for MySQL, and Fabric Databases—without changing how each service is deployed.

Built for scale, the Database Hub in Fabric introduces an agent‑assisted, human-in-the loop approach to database management. With built-in observability, delegated governance, and Microsoft Copilot-powered insights, teams can deploy intelligent agents to continuously reason over estate‑wide signals and surface what changed, explain why it matters, and guide teams toward what to do next. The result is a simpler, more confident way to manage databases at scale. Over time, this model enables database estates to become more proactive, resilient, and intelligent, laying the foundation for greater autonomy, while keeping humans firmly in control of goals, boundaries, and trust.

Learn more about Database Hub in Fabric and what’s new across Databases
Bringing databases together under a single management layer is a critical step as you prepare your estates for AI at scale. But it’s not the end of the journey. The challenge shifts from where data lives to how data is understood, connected, and activated across the enterprise.

Getting your data estate ready for AI with Fabric
As organizations move from traditional applications to AI‑powered, multi‑agent systems, the advantage is shifting away from the specific model you deploy. It now lies in the intelligence and context that allow agents to understand how your business is run, the state of your business, and your institutional knowledge to help take meaningful action.

This is the challenge Microsoft IQ is designed to address. Unlike point solutions on the market today, Microsoft IQ provides an intelligence layer that delivers shared, enterprise-grade business context to every agent. That context is built from three complementary sources: productivity signals from Work IQ, institutional knowledge from Foundry IQ, and live business data from Fabric IQ.

However, like the database layer, while the IQ context layer is a critical part of a successful, and healthy AI foundation, it is not the full story. Building a complete AI-ready data foundation requires investing in four core steps:

Unifying your data estate to eliminate silos and reduce architectural complexity.
Processing and harmonizing data so it becomes AI-ready, clean, connected, and structured for both operational and analytical use.
Curating semantic meaning to give agents contextual understanding, enabling them to interpret data the way your teams already do. This is where Microsoft IQ comes into play.
Empowering AI agents to act, applying that context to automate workflows, accelerate decisions, and transform operations end‑to‑end.
Unifying your data estate with Microsoft OneLake
Every AI initiative starts with the same fundamental challenge: understanding where your data lives and how to bring it together. Microsoft OneLake was built to solve that problem by unifying data across clouds, on-premises environments, and third-party platforms into a single logical data lake without unnecessary extracting, transforming, and loading (ETL), fragmentation, or duplicated copies.

Are my agents hunting for data?

Watch the podcast
Connecting to more sources than ever before
Today, we’re expanding Mirroring in Fabric to support even more systems our customers rely on. Mirroring for SharePoint lists and Dremio are now in preview with Azure Monitor coming soon, while mirroring for Oracle and SAP Datasphere are generally available—all of which are available as part of the core mirroring capabilities. We are also introducing extended capabilities in mirroring designed to help you operationalize mirrored sources at scale, including Change Data Feed (CDF) and the ability to create views on top of mirrored data, starting with Snowflake. Extended capabilities for mirroring will be offered as a paid option.

Shortcut transformations are also now generally available, allowing data to be shaped automatically as it connects to or moves within OneLake. You can convert formats such as Excel to Delta tables, now in preview, and apply AI-powered transformations.

Additionally, we are continuing to invest in open interoperability, ensuring OneLake works seamlessly with the platforms organizations already use. We are excited to announce the ability to natively read from OneLake through Azure Databricks Unity Catalog is now in public preview. We also recently announced the general availability of our interoperability with Snowflake.

I’m also excited to share that Auger, a rapidly growing supply chain platform designed to bring intelligence and automation to global operations, has built its platform on Fabric, with all data stored natively in OneLake. This architecture enables Auger customers to seamlessly access their operations data through OneLake shortcuts within their own Fabric environments and use the full power of the platform including Power BI, Fabric data agents, and more. Learn more in my blog, co-authored with Auger Chief Executive Officer Dave Clark.

Protect your data with OneLake security, now generally available
Security and governance remain foundational to OneLake. I’m thrilled to announce OneLake security will be generally available in the coming weeks, enabling data owners to define roles, enforce row- and column-level controls, and manage permissions through a single unified model that follows the data.

To learn more about these announcements, read the OneLake blog and the Fabric Data Factory blog.

Processing and harmonizing data with Fabric analytics
AI agents are only as reliable as the data you feed them. Before data can train or ground an agent, it must be integrated, cleaned, and structured, so the agent operates from consistent, trusted information. With industry-leading engines in Fabric like Spark, T-SQL, KQL, and Analysis Services, we can equip data teams to do exactly that.

Now, we are expanding these capabilities with the introduction of Runtime 2.0 in preview, purpose-built for large-scale data computation. It incorporates Apache Spark 4.x, Delta Lake 4.x, Scala 2.13, and Azure Linux Mariner 3.0 to power advanced enterprise workloads. Materialized lake views are also now generally available, simplifying medallion architecture implementation in Spark SQL and PySpark and enabling always up-to-date pipelines with no manual orchestration. In addition, a new agentic Copilot experience in notebooks delivers deeper context awareness, reasoning over your workspace, and generating code with greater speed and precision.

For real-time scenarios, we’re launching Microsoft Fabric Maps into general availability. Maps add geospatial context to your agents and operations by turning large volumes of location-based data into interactive, real-time visual insights.

For a comprehensive overview of these announcements and much more, read the Fabric Analytics announcement blog and the Fabric Real-Time Intelligence announcement blog.

Creating semantic meaning with Fabric IQ
Preparing raw data for AI is essential. The next step is transforming that data into meaningful, unified business context. That is where Fabric IQ comes in.

Fabric IQ unifies analytical data and operational data, including telemetry, time series, graph, and geospatial data, within a shared semantic framework of business entities, relationships, properties, rules, and actions. Instead of thinking in terms of tables and schemas, your teams and agents can operate on this framework, or ontology, aligned to how the business actually runs.

Fabric IQ ontologies will soon become accessible through an MCP server in preview, enabling agents to discover, understand, and act on this semantic layer. Ontologies can also serve as context sources for maps and soon in operations agents in Fabric, extending shared business context directly into operational decision-making and execution.

We are also excited to announce planning in Fabric IQ, a new enterprise planning capability that enables organizations to create plans, budgets, forecasts, and scenario models directly on top of Fabric’s semantic models. By complementing Fabric IQ’s ontologies with integrated planning, you get a complete, contextual view of your historical, real-time, and forward planning data. This allows users and agents to quickly answer what has happened, what is happening, and what should happen all from a single source. See this in action:

Finally, we recently announced a strategic partnership with NVIDIA to power the next generation of Physical AI by integrating Real-Time Intelligence and Fabric IQ with NVIDIA Omniverse libraries. The combined platform unifies real‑time operational data, business semantics, and physical simulation to enable organizations to optimize their physical operations in scenarios like intelligent digital twins, predictive maintenance, autonomous logistics, and energy optimization.

To learn more about all of our partner announcements, read the Fabric ISV announcement blog and the planning in Fabric IQ blog.

Enhancing the underlying Fabric IQ technology
Powering much of Fabric IQ’s rich experience is a combination of Power BI’s industry-leading, rich semantic model technology and graph in Fabric, our highly scalable graph database. Already delivering insights to more than 35 million active users, semantic models provide the ideal foundation for training agents through Fabric IQ. Now, with the general availability of Direct Lake on OneLake, your tables can be read directly from OneLake with native security enforcement, richer cross-item modeling, and import-class performance without data movement or refresh.

I’m also excited to share that graph in Fabric will be generally available in the coming weeks, enabling teams to visualize and query complex relationships across customers, partners, and supply chains.

To learn more, check out the Fabric IQ announcement blog and the Power BI announcement blog.

Empowering agents to act with Fabric data and operations agents
Frontier organizations are moving beyond general-purpose assistants and instead, adopting multi-agent systems composed of specialized agents. These agents are each grounded on specific data and reusable across different systems, allowing you to deliver more accurate, accelerated, and scalable outcomes.

To support your multi-agent systems, Fabric comes with built-in agent creation capabilities with Fabric data agents and operations agents. I’m excited to share that Fabric data agents are now generally available. Fabric data agents can be thought of as virtual analysts, aligned to specific domain data to support deeper analysis and deliver insights. Operations agents complement them by monitoring real-time data, detecting patterns, and taking proactive action.

Check out a quick demo of operations agents in Fabric:

These agents can be used across Fabric or as foundational knowledge sources in leading AI tools like Microsoft Foundry, Copilot Studio or even Microsoft 365 Copilot. To learn more about our AI announcements, check out the Fabric analytics blog covering data agents and the Fabric IQ blog covering operations agents.

Building mission-critical applications with developer experiences in Fabric
Developers building the next generation of AI applications need a comprehensive, cost-effective data platform that’s already integrated with your existing tools and workflows. Today, we are expanding Fabric’s developer tooling to meet that demand.

First, Fabric Model Context Protocol (MCP) is advancing with two major milestones. Fabric local MCP is now generally available, providing an open-source local server that connects AI coding assistants such as GitHub Copilot directly to Fabric. Alongside this, we’re introducing the public preview of Fabric remote MCP, a secure, cloud‑hosted execution engine that enables AI agents and automation tools to perform authenticated actions in Fabric.

We’re also enhancing our Git integration with selective branching, allowing developers to branch out for a specific feature and pull only the items they need. You also get improved change comparisons to more easily review recent updates, and new folder relationships which show how feature workspaces connect to source workspaces.

We’re also launching two open-source projects to help teams move faster with Fabric: Agent Skills for Fabric and Fabric Jumpstart. Agent Skills for Fabric is an open-source set of purpose-built plugins that let you use natural language in the GitHub Copilot terminal to harness the full power of Microsoft Fabric. Additionally, Fabric Jumpstart is designed to help you get off the ground with detailed guidance, reference architectures, and single‑click deployments for sample datasets, notebooks, pipelines, and reports.

Finally, we are announcing that the Fabric Extensibility Toolkit (FET), an evolution of the Workload Development Kit (WDK), is now generally available. Along with this release, we are enabling support for full CI/CD, variable library, and a new management experience in the Admin portal.

Read the Fabric Platform announcement blog
Migrating your existing Azure service to Fabric
As Fabric continues to grow in functionality, we are also simplifying the migration from other Azure services. In addition to our existing Synapse tooling, we are bringing new migration assistants for Azure Data Factory, Azure Synapse Analytics, and Azure SQL in public preview.

The new Fabric migration assistant for Azure Data Factory and Synapse Analytics helps move your existing pipelines and artifacts like Spark pools and notebooks into Fabric with minimal disruption. It’s designed to support incremental modernization, allowing teams to evaluate, convert, and optimize pipelines as they transition to Fabric. The migration assistant for SQL databases helps move SQL Server into Fabric by importing schemas through DACPACs, identifying and resolving compatibility issues with AI assistance, and guiding teams through assessment and data copy workflows for a smoother cutover.

See more Fabric innovation
Explore the AI shift with The Shift podcast
In addition to the announcements above, we are also rolling out a broad set of Fabric innovations across the platform. For a deeper look at the updates and what’s new this month, visit the Fabric March 2026 Feature summary blog, the Power BI March 2026 feature summary blog, and the latest posts on the Fabric Updates channel.

Explore additional resources for Microsoft Fabric
Sign up for the Fabric free trial. View the updated Fabric Roadmap. Try the Microsoft Fabric SKU Estimator.
Visit the Fabric website. Join the Fabric community. Read other in-depth, technical blogs on the Microsoft Fabric Updates Blog.
Read additional blogs by industry-leading partners
Sonata Software: Building an AI-ready data platform with data agents, ontology, and governance in Microsoft Fabric
Quadrant Technologies LLC: Real-Time Operational Intelligence in Microsoft Fabric: Deep Dive into RTI Capabilities, Anomaly Detection and Activator Alerting
Inspark: Why switch from Azure Synapse to Microsoft Fabric?
Esri: Unlock the power of location intelligence with ArcGIS for Microsoft Fabric
Dream IT Consulting Services: 8 Real-World Use Cases of Data Agents in Microsoft Fabric
UB Technology Innovations Inc.: From Data Platform to Decision Platform: How Microsoft Fabric and Copilot are Redefining Enterprise Analytics
Simpson Associates: Fabric Data Warehouse: Bringing Structure to Modern Data Strategies
Synapx Ltd.: Migrating Power BI to Microsoft Fabric Lakehouse with Medallion Architecture: A Strategic Imperative for Modern Construction Enterprises
Cloud Services: Real-Time Intelligence in Action: How Microsoft Fabric Helped Delfi Transform Its Newsroom
Cloud Services: Microsoft Fabric Data Agents: A New Reality
iLink Digital: Detect to Act in Seconds: How Real-Time Intelligence Is Rewriting the Rules of Emissions Management
Valorem Reply: How Nonprofits Are Rethinking Data with Microsoft Fabric

The post FabCon and SQLCon 2026: Unifying databases and Fabric on a single data platform appeared first on Microsoft SQL Server Blog.

This year, DPS 2020 features five parallel tracks focusing on Azure Data:

• Advanced Analytics
• Artificial Intelligence
• Azure Data Administration
• Azure Data Development
• Power BI

The virtual platform offers live Q and A, a networking lounge, a community zone, and technical round tables. Additionally, attendees will receive 12 month on-demand access to session recordings.

DPS 2020 offers an incredible opportunity to learn directly from our engineering teams, who will share the latest advances and insights on the Azure Data platform.

• Rohan Kumar will deliver the keynote. Rohan will highlight the latest innovations across the Microsoft Azure Data platform and share customer case studies. The keynote will also feature demos from multiple Microsoft engineers, including Anitha Adusumilli, Anna Hoffman, Buck Woody, Travis Wright, and Vasiya Krishnan.
• Microsoft Azure Data engineering teams will deliver over 35 sessions at DPS 2020. Hear the latest from the people who develop the tools you use every day, and engage in live discussions.
• Visit the virtual expo hall where you can connect with our team across SQL Server, Azure SQL, Azure Synapse Analytics, Power BI, and more.

Register now for a week of training at Data Platform Virtual Summit and receive twelve months of on-demand access to the DPS 2020 sessions.

The post Microsoft Azure at Data Platform Virtual Summit 2020 appeared first on Microsoft SQL Server Blog.

You can download SSMS 18.0 RC1 today and for more details on what’s included, please see the Release Notes.

This SQL Server Management Studio 18 RC1 build has some important updates as seen below:

SSMS improvements:

• Enabling XMLA endpoint connectivity to Power BI datasets: XMLA endpoints provide access to the Analysis Services engine in the Power BI Service. This allows tools such as SSMS and SQL Profiler to connect to Power BI datasets for monitoring, management, and debugging etc. For more details, please review XMLA endpoint connectivity in the Power BI blog.

SQL Server Management Objects (SMO)

• Added cascade delete support to “Edge Constraints” in both SMO and SSMS.
• Added support for data classification “read-write” permissions.

Audit Files

• Updated the list of known audit actions to include FEATURE RESTRICTION ADD/CHANGE GROUP/DROP

In addition, we also have several bug fixes in the following areas:

SSMS:

• Fixed an issue which was preventing MFA authentication when user ids belonged to multiple tenants.
• Fixed an issue where the Perf Dashboard Report was reporting PAGELATCH and PAGEIOLATCH waits that could not found in sub-reports.
• Fixed an issue which resulted in an “Index out of range” exception when clicking on the grid.
• Fixed an issue where the grid result background color was being ignored. For more details, you can review Azure feedback.

Managed Instance support

• Improved the display of Managed Instances server specific properties (hardware generation, service tier, storage used, and reserved).

Azure SQL Database

• Fixed an issue where Service Level Objectives (SLO) were hard-coded, making it harder for SSMS to support newer SQL Azure SLOs. Now users can sign in to Azure and allow SSMS to retrieve all the applicable SLO data (Edition and Max Size).

For a full list of changes, please see the Release Notes.

As usual, if you have a previous version of SSMS 18.0 preview, you will need to uninstall it first. SSMS 18.0 RC1 can be installed side-by-side with SSMS 17.x for testing purposes. As a reminder, the use of pre-GA software in production environments is not supported.

We’d love to hear from you! Please let us know if you have any questions, comments or feature suggestions.

The post SQL Server Management Studio 18.0 Release Candidate 1 is now available appeared first on Microsoft SQL Server Blog.

Be a part of the largest SQL Server professional gathering in Europe at SQL Bits 2019. At SQL Bits, you have the unique opportunity to meet with community leaders sharing their real world experience and Microsoft product teams providing deep insights into Microsoft data solutions.

For those attending this year, we’ve put together a quick guide below on some of the Data and AI sessions you can look forward to. Can’t wait until SQL Bits? Check out the conference sessions to get a taste of what you won’t want to miss at SQL Bits 2019.

SQL Bits is also running a promotion right now to share their love for data. Save 50% when you add an extra day using the code: welovedata

Keynote

Friday, March 1

Data Never Rests

Speaker: Buck Woody and Bob Ward

In today’s world, the growth of data is ushering in an era of rapid innovation. Microsoft’s goal is to bring the best hybrid data platform to help data professionals in building a data infrastructure that supports their organization now and into the future.  Join Buck Woody, Bob Ward, Anna Thomas, Alain Dormehl, and Adam Saxton as they demonstrate the latest advances from Microsoft across SQL Server, Azure Data Services, Business Analytics, and AI.

Pre-conference activities (training days)

Wednesday, February 27

Modernize your database with SQL Server 2019

Speaker: Bob Ward

Earlier in September, we announced SQL Server 2019 preview, the first release of SQL Server to create a unified data platform by packaging Apache Spark^TM and Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) together with SQL Server as a single, integrated solution. In this session, come join us for a deep dive into SQL Server 2019.

Building a modern database architecture with Azure

Speaker: Jes Borland

This session will review the key foundations of Azure and introduce various Azure database options like SQL Server MI, Azure SQL DB, Cosmos DB, etc.

Thursday, February 28

Microsoft SQL Server Big Data Clusters architecture

Speaker: Buck Woody

This session is a  deep dive into the concepts of big data analytics and data virtualization in SQL Server 2019. You will also learn about the architecture to enable machine learning to train your models within SQL Server 2019.

Data science from scratch with Azure Machine Learning

Speaker: Mithun Prasad

This will be a crash course to create data science solutions and apply machine learning algorithms to real world scenarios.

SELECT * FROM Azure Cosmos DB

Speaker: Theo van Kraay

This pre-conference session will provide in-depth training on Azure Cosmos DB. At the end of the training, you will be equipped to build your applications on Cosmos DB.

Deep dive into Azure Data Factory with SSIS

Speaker: Sandy Winarko

This session will focus on modernizing your extract, transform, and load (ETL) workloads with a deeper integration of SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) in Azure Data Factory (ADF).

Highlighted sessions during the conference March 1st and 2nd

Inside SQL Server 2019

Speakers: Bob Ward, Buck Woody, Anna Thomas

Come learn all the new capabilities of SQL Server 2019 directly from the Microsoft engineering team.

What’s New – Query Performance Insights

Speaker: Pedro Lopes

Come and be a rockstar at troubleshooting query performance with all the latest innovations in intelligent query processing.

Hyperscale for Azure SQL DB   

Speaker: Kevin Farlee

In this session you’ll learn how the Hyperscale service tier in Azure SQL DB removes many of the practical limits traditionally seen in cloud.

A dive into the architecture that is Azure SQL DW Gen2. How does it work?

Speaker: Philip Beaumont, Neil Millington

Come learn how you can turbocharge your query performance and concurrency with a fully managed cloud data warehouse.

Getting intimate with the Power BI desktop

Speaker: Patrick LeBlanc, Adam Saxton

Join us in this session, where we will dive deep into the Power BI desktop.

Enterprise BI with Power BI Premium and SSAS

Speaker: Christian Wade

Join the two-part series to learn about the new features landing in SQL Server Analysis services and also learn how to use Power BI premium to create semantic models.

There are over 44 sessions from Microsoft data platform speakers, and we invite you to come hear from Microsoft and community experts at SQL Bits 2019.

The post Join us at SQL Bits 2019 February 27-March 2 in Manchester, UK! appeared first on Microsoft SQL Server Blog.

Today Microsoft announced Power BI Premium — a capacity-based licensing model that increases flexibility for how users access, share and distribute content in Power BI. The new offering also introduces the ability to manage Power BI Reports on-premises with the included Power BI Report Server.

Power BI Report Server will be generally available late in the second quarter of 2017.

Read the Power BI Report Server announcement and learn more about Power BI Report Server on the Power BI website.

The post Announcing Power BI Report Server appeared first on Microsoft SQL Server Blog.

At first approach, this depth can be overwhelming – how do all the components fit together? Where are things heading in the future? These are frequent questions from our customers and partners.

As we approach the release of SQL Server 2016 it’s a great time to tackle those questions in a definitive blog.

Where we are heading

Our goal is simple – we want to put the power of data in the hands of every business and person on the planet. It is our objective to serve over a billion users with the Microsoft business intelligence (BI) platform.

Data is coming at us from every direction. From traditional sources – on-premises enterprise applications and databases. From sources developed over the last decade – websites, mobile applications, social media and SaaS business applications. And from sources still emerging – data from the “Internet of Things.”

Maximizing the potential of one’s data requires a platform that can work with data from on-premises systems and from the cloud – of any shape, size and arrival velocity, that can deliver insights wherever users may be, and in a form most convenient and accessible; and that offers deployment options that best fit the needs of an organization, at any point in its journey.

To achieve these requirements, we are aligning our cloud and on-premises solutions. It is our intent that your reporting technology investments and expertise will transfer across these deployment modalities so you can easily mix and match on-premises and cloud components, and benefit from our unique hybrid scenarios.

Harmonizing report types

We intend to standardize reporting content types across Microsoft on-premises, cloud and hybrid systems. Our reporting path forward focuses on four report types:

• Paginated reports built with SQL Server Report Builder or SQL Server Data Tools. Paginated reports allow for exact placement of elements on a page and are capable of complex display logic for creating printed reports or online operational reports. Paginated/operational reports have been a popular, invaluable foundation for day-to-day reporting and analytics for over a decade. These reports will continue to be a standard report type.
  
• Interactive reports built with Power BI Desktop. Power BI Desktop is a contemporary visual data discovery application and the next generation of our Power View technology. It generates HTML5-based reports, ensuring compatibility across all modern browsers.
• Mobile reports are based on Datazen technology. We believe dedicated reports optimized for mobile devices and form factors provide an optimal experience for users accessing BI reports on mobile devices. By specifically designing reports for different mobile form factors, we deliver on our promise and enable users to get business insights, any way, anywhere and from any device.
• Analytical reports and charts created with Excel. Excel is the most widely used analytical tool today and it will continue to be an important report type, critical to our solution on-premises and in the cloud.

Reporting Services is our on-premises solution for BI report delivery

SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) to date has focused on paginated reports and offers class-leading capabilities for that format. With SQL Server 2016 we are taking a leap forward by adding support for mobile reports. The addition of this new report type in SSRS is accompanied by an entirely new web experience for Reporting Services allowing users to access both paginated and mobile reports in one centralized location.

This modernized SSRS web experience delivers the foundation for centralized report consumption, embedding and sharing of BI reports for those organizations that desire an on-premises option (versus using Power BI in the cloud).

Publish Power BI Desktop Reports on-premises

Power BI Desktop is a data discovery and interactive reporting tool allowing business analysts to connect, prepare, and visually explore data across a freeform canvas. It combines the strengths of Power Query to connect to a vast spectrum of data sources and easily shape data, Power Pivot for rich data blending and modeling, and next generation Power View to intuitively perform visual analytics and author compelling reports.

Based on the same technology as Power View, Power BI Desktop supports existing Power View reports and provides the future path to a HTML5 based interactive report experience on-premises.

Just as we’ve added mobile report delivery to SSRS in SQL Server 2016, we intend to add governed Power BI Desktop report delivery in the future. Today Power BI Desktop supports publishing of reports to Power BI; Power BI Desktop is free to use, experience it yourself today.

Unified Mobile BI experience

Whether using SQL Server Reporting Services on-premises, Power BI in the cloud, or both as your report delivery solution, we’ll have a single mobile application (for each of Windows, iOS and Android) for consumption of all report types. At PASS Summit 2015 we demonstrated a single Power BI mobile application delivering a combination of report types from both SQL Server Reporting Services 2016 and the Power BI service. All of your BI content will be at your fingertips from within a single, unified mobile app to deliver insights any way, anywhere and from any device.

Symmetry across on-premises and cloud

As we continue to harmonize our offerings across cloud and on-premises, we continue to align technologies and tools across all parts of our BI platform.

Mirroring technologies across on-premises and the cloud enables one to easily switch between the two. Our approach also offers unique hybrid capabilities needed in a big data world where data lives in many locations.

For example, you can use your existing on-premises SSAS multi-dimensional models with enforced row-level security as a data source for Power BI without moving your data to the cloud; or directly connect to data in an on-premises SQL Server database without requiring SSAS, again without requiring your data move to the cloud.

You can choose, manage and monitor on-premises-to-Power BI data connections using our forthcoming enterprise gateway capability. Pin your favorite chart from an operational SSRS report to a Power BI dashboard to leverage your existing reporting investments in SQL Server Reporting Services.

It’s your data. We are here to empower you to drive your business based on insights gained from that data, whether your data is on-premises, in the cloud or a combination of the two.

The future is bright

Let us know what you think, share your comments about our future direction, and of course try out the latest SQL Server 2016 CTP, and Power BI Desktop to experience the future of SQL Server BI today.

Lastly, if you are attending PASS Summit this week, join us for our on-premises BI sessions today and tomorrow:

Oct. 29, 2015 at 1:30 pm PST: What’s New in SQL Server 2016 Reporting Services [BIA-321-M] in TCC 304 by Riccardo Muti
Oct. 30, 2015 at 11:15 am PST: The Analysis Services Evolution [BID-311-M] in TCC 303 by Kasper de Jonge
Oct. 30, 2015 at 3:30 pm PST: Datazen Technical Deep Dive [BID-312-M] in TCC 304 by Chris Finlan and Paul Turley

The post Microsoft Business Intelligence – our reporting roadmap appeared first on Microsoft SQL Server Blog.

James Phillips began his career writing software for the Apple II, TRS-80 and IBM PC platforms. In 1984, at age 17, he co-founded his first software company, Fifth Generation Systems.  In 2004 James co-founded and served as CEO of Akimbi, a virtualization management software company acquired by VMware in 2006 for $60 million generating 250% and 500% IRR for series A and B investors, respectively. James has held executive leadership roles in software engineering, product management, marketing and corporate development at large public companies including Microsoft, Intel and VMware and with venture-backed software startups.  James holds a BS in Mathematics and earned his MBA, with honors, from the University of Chicago.

Phillips joined Microsoft in 2012 as a strategy advisor to Satya Nadella, then president of Microsoft’s Cloud and Enterprise division. His teams build and operate a wide range of products and services, contributing approximately two billion USD in aggregate annual revenue, including the Power BI cloud (SaaS) analytics service and its supporting iPhone, iPad, Android and Windows apps; Microsoft SQL Server Analysis and Reporting Servers; and offerings spanning Visual Studio, Microsoft Office, Office 365, SharePoint and SharePoint Online.

We are looking forward to seeing all of you at the event. Please register, if you have not already, at – www.sqlpass.org/summit/2015/RegisterNow.aspx.

The post Come hear CVP James Phillips speak about advances in Microsoft Business Intelligence appeared first on Microsoft SQL Server Blog.

See what BI and Big Data training courses were your peers’ favorites in 2014:

• Faster Insights to Data with Power BI Jumpstart
• From Data to Insight and Impact: The BI Revolution
• Getting Started with Microsoft Azure Machine Learning
• Big Data and Business Analytics Immersion v3.1
• Microsoft Corporate BI & SAP BI Integration Jumpstart
• Designing BI Solutions with Microsoft SQL Server
• Implementing Data Models & Reports with Microsoft SQL Server
• Excel 2013 Power BI Fundamentals
• Implementing Big Data Analysis

And last but not least, check out the brand new Big Data with the Microsoft Analytics Platform Services.

Learn more about Microsoft’s big data solutions or find training opportunities on the Microsoft Virtual Academy.

The post New Year’s Resolution? Free BI and Big Data Training appeared first on Microsoft SQL Server Blog.

Microsoft is happy to announce the release of the Analytics Platform System (APS) Appliance Update (AU) 3. APS is Microsoft’s big data in a box appliance for serving the needs of relational data warehouses at massive scale. With this release, the APS appliance supports new scenarios for utilizing Power BI modeling, visualization, and collaboration tools over on premise data sets. In addition, this release extends the PolyBase to allow customers to utilize the HDFS infrastructure in Hadoop for ORC files and directory modeling to more easily integrate non-relational data into their data insights.

The AU3 release includes:

• PolyBase recursive Directory Traversal and ORC file format support
• Integrated Data Management Gateway enables query from Power BI to on premise APS
• TSQL compatibility improvements to reduce migration friction from SQL Server SMP
• Replatformed to Windows Server 2012 R2 and SQL Server 2014

PolyBase Directory Traversal and ORC File Support

PolyBase is an integrated technology that allows customers to utilize the skillset that they have developed in TSQL for querying and managing data in Hadoop platforms. With the AU3 release, the APS team has augmented this technology with the ability to define an external table that targets a directory structure as a whole. This new ability unlocks a whole new set of scenarios for customers to utilize their existing investments in Hadoop as well as APS to provide greater insight into all of the data collected within their data systems. In addition, AU3 introduces full support for the Optimized Row Column (ORC) file format – a common storage mechanism for files within Hadoop.

As an example of this new capability, let’s examine a customer that is using APS to host inventory and Point of Sale (POS) data in an APS appliance while storing the web logs from their ecommerce site in a Hadoop path structure. With AU3, the customer can simply maintain a structure for their logs in Hadoop in a structure that is easy to construct such as year/month/date/server/log for simple storage and recovery within Hadoop that can then be exposed as a single table to analysts and data scientists for insights.

In this example, let’s assume that each of the Serverxx folders contains the log file for that server on that particular day. In order to surface the entire structure, we can construct an external table using the following definition:

CREATE EXTERNAL TABLE [dbo].[WebLogs]
(
	[Date] DATETIME NULL,
	[Uri] NVARCHAR(256) NULL,
	[Server] NVARCHAR(256) NULL,
	[Referrer] NVARCHAR(256) NULL
)
WITH
(
	LOCATION='//Logs/',
	DATA_SOURCE = Azure_DS,
	FILE_FORMAT = LogFileFormat,
	REJECT_TYPE = VALUE,
	REJECT_VALUE = 100
);

By setting the LOCATION targeted at the //Logs/ folder, the external table will pull data from all folders and files within the directory structure. In this case, a simple select of the data will return data from only the last 10 entries regardless of the log file that contains the data:

SELECT TOP 5
	*
FROM
	[dbo].[WebLogs]
ORDER BY
	[Date]

The results are:

Note: PolyBase, like Hadoop, will not return results from hidden folders or any file that begins with an underscore (_) or period(.).

Integrated Data Management Gateway

With the integration of the Microsoft Data Management Gateway into APS, customers now have a scale-out compute gateway for Azure cloud services to more effectively query sophisticated sets of on-premises data.  Power BI users can leverage PolyBase in APS to perform more complicated mash-ups of results from on-premises unstructured data sets in Hadoop distributions. By exposing the data from the APS Appliance as an OData feed, Power BI is able to easily and quickly consume the data for display to end users.

For more details, please look for an upcoming blog post on the Integrated Data Management Gateway.

TSQL Compatibility improvements

The AU3 release incorporates a set of TSQL improvements targeted at richer language support to improve the types of queries and procedures that can be written for APS. For AU3, the primary focus was on implementing full error handling within TSQL to allow customers to port existing applications to APS with minimal code change and to introduce full error handling to existing APS customers. Released in AU3 are the following keywords and constructs for handling errors:

• TRY…CATCH
• THROW
• RAISERROR
• PRINT
• ERROR_MESSAGE, ERROR_NUMBER, ERROR_SEVERITY, ERROR_STATE, ERROR_PROCEDURE
• @@ERROR

In addition to the error handling components, the AU3 release also includes support for the XACT_STATE scalar function that is used to indicate the current running transaction state of a user request.

Replatformed to Windows Server 2012 R2 and SQL Server 2014

The AU3 release also marks the upgrade of the core fabric of the APS appliance to Windows Server 2012 R2 and SQL Server 2014. With the upgrade to the latest versions of Microsoft’s flagship server operating system and core relational database engine, the APS appliance takes advantage of the improved networking, storage and query execution components of these products. For example, the APS appliance now utilizes a virtualized Active Directory infrastructure which helps to reduce cost and increase domain reliability within the appliance helping to make APS the price/performance leader in the big data appliance space.

APS on the Web

To learn more about the Microsoft Analytics Platform System, please visit us on the web at http://approjects.co.za/?big=aps.

The post Relational Data Warehouse + Big Data Analytics: Analytics Platform System (APS) Appliance Update 3 appeared first on Microsoft SQL Server Blog.

To realize the greatest value from their data, businesses need familiar tools that empower all their employees to make decisions informed by data. By delivering powerful analytics capabilities in Excel and deploying business intelligence solutions in the cloud through Office 365, we are reducing the barriers for companies to analyze, share and gain insight from data. Our customers have been responding to this approach through rapid adoption of our business analytics solutions — millions of users are utilizing our BI capabilities in Excel and thousands of companies have activated Power BI for Office 365 tenants.

One example of how our customers are using our business analytics tools is MediaCom, a global advertising agency which is using our technology to optimize performance and “spend” across their media campaigns utilizing data from third party vendors. With Power BI for Office 365, the company now has a unified dashboard for real-time data analysis, can share reports, and can ask natural-language questions that instantly return answers in the form of charts and graphs. MediaCom now anticipates analyses in days versus weeks and productivity gains that can add millions of dollars in value per campaign.

One of the reasons we’re experiencing strong customer adoption is because of our increased pace of delivery and regular service updates. Earlier this week we released updates for the Power Query add-in for Excel and today we are announcing the availability of forecasting capabilities in Power BI for Office 365. With forecasting users can predict their data series forward in interactive charts and reports. With these new Power BI capabilities, users can explore the forecasted results, adjust for seasonality and outliers, view result ranges at different confidence levels, and hindcast to view how the model would have predicted recent results.

In the keynote we also discussed how we will continue to innovate to enable better user experiences through touch-optimized capabilities for data exploration. We are also working with our customers to make their existing on-premises investments “cloud-ready”, including the ability for customers to run their SQL Server Reporting Services and SQL Server Analysis Services reports and cubes in the cloud against on-premises data. For cross-platform mobile access across all devices we will add new features to make HTML5 the default experience for Power View.

To learn more about the new forecasting capabilities in Power BI for O365, go here. If you’re attending the PASS Business Analytics Conference this week, be sure to stop by the Microsoft booth to see our impressive Power BI demos and attend some of the exciting sessions we’re presenting at the event.

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