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Combined Power BI and Microsoft Fabric release blog, filtered to the things a bank finance/BI team actually deploys: semantic models, DAX, paginated reports, deployment pipelines, Fabric warehouse, Copilot, and governance.

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Semantic Models & DAX07 ITEMS

SEP 17 · 2026GANewSource ↗

Manage semantic model settings in context with the default settings pane (Preview)

The semantic model settings pane is becoming the default way to configure semantic models in the Power BI service. The pane opens alongside your workspace, so you can review and change settings without leaving the current page. It provides the same settings as the full semantic m

Semantic Models & DAXService & Governance
Why it mattersYou can now adjust semantic model settings like query folding, aggregations, and refresh schedules without navigating away from your current workspace view.
SEP 01 · 2026GANewSource ↗

Advanced DAX generation for semantic models in Fabric data agents (Preview)

Advanced DAX generation for Power BI semantic models is now available in Fabric data agents through the Preview runtime. The experience changes how a data agent translates natural-language questions into DAX by allowing it to plan, use tools, inspect intermediate results, and ref

Semantic Models & DAX
Why it mattersYou can now have Fabric data agents auto-generate complex DAX queries by breaking down natural-language questions into planned steps, letting you validate intermediate results before final execution.
AUG 24 · 2026GANewSource ↗

Direct Lake Calculated Columns (Preview)

Calculated columns are now available in preview for Direct Lake on OneLake semantic models. This has been one of the most requested capabilities since Direct Lake launched and closes a long-standing gap with Import and DirectQuery storage modes.You can define calculated columns d

Fabric Warehouse & LakehouseSemantic Models & DAX
Why it mattersWrite calculated columns directly into Direct Lake semantic models without converting to Import mode, eliminating the performance trade-off between calculation flexibility and query speed.
AUG 20 · 2026GANewSource ↗

The AI Semantic Layer You Probably Already Have

If your organization uses Power BI, you own something most companies chasing AI are desperately trying to build. You just may not know it by name.Let me explain.The invisible thing behind every reportEvery Power BI report you have ever opened sits on top of a semantic model. Ever

Copilot & AISemantic Models & DAX
Why it mattersYou can now expose your existing semantic models directly to business users via natural language queries, letting them ask questions of your data without building new reports or dashboards.
AUG 06 · 2026GANewSource ↗

Evaluate Fabric workload performance with the modern evaluation engine for VNet data gateways (Preview)

Virtual network (VNet) data gateways help organizations connect Microsoft Fabric workloads to data sources that are protected by virtual network boundaries. They are commonly used when teams need private connectivity for semantic models, Dataflow Gen2, and DirectQuery scenarios w

Fabric Warehouse & LakehouseSemantic Models & DAX
Why it mattersYou can now diagnose whether VNet gateway latency is bottlenecking your DirectQuery semantic models and Dataflow Gen2 refreshes instead of guessing at network performance issues.
JUL 02 · 2026GANewSource ↗

Deep dive into visual calculations: Adding calculations directly to your Power BI visuals

Visual calculations (Generally Available) in Power BI, making it easier to add DAX calculations directly to the visual where they’re used.

Semantic Models & DAXReports & Visuals
Why it mattersYou can now write DAX formulas that operate on visual result sets without creating model measures, letting you prototype calculations and ship CFO dashboard updates faster without touching the semantic model.
JUL 01 · 2026GANewSource ↗

Power BI reports and Fabric Apps: Expanding how you build on your semantic model data

Power BI reports continue to help analysts build secure, governed BI experiences on semantic models, while Fabric Apps expands what developers can create from the same trusted data.

Semantic Models & DAX
Why it mattersYou can now expose the same semantic model to both traditional Power BI report consumers and custom Fabric App developers without duplicating the data layer or governance controls.

Reports & Visuals06 ITEMS

SEP 02 · 2026GANewSource ↗

Power BI sample reports, refreshed with modern visual defaults

Microsoft has refreshed its Power BI sample reports with modern visual defaults, stronger semantic models, mobile-optimized layouts, and newer authoring features to help creators build clearer, more effective reports.

Reports & Visuals
Why it matters(Marked not directly relevant for this audience.)
AUG 19 · 2026GANewSource ↗

Billing personas for PowerTable within Planning in Fabric IQ

Enterprise Planning is cyclical, and Fabric Planning is built for that reality. Instead of per-user licenses or a separate subscription, Fabric Plan uses an activity-based, session-driven model that bills only against your Fabric capacity. You avoid license commitments and admini

Service & GovernanceReports & Visuals
Why it matters(Marked not directly relevant for this audience.)
JUL 23 · 2026GANewSource ↗

Deep dive into modern visual defaults and formatting your entire report (Preview)

Power BI's modern visual defaults and new Customize theme experience enable report authors to centrally manage colors, typography, visual styling, page settings, and filter pane formatting across an entire report, creating consistent, professional reports faster while preserving

Reports & Visuals
Why it mattersYou can now set colors, fonts, and visual styles once at the report level instead of manually formatting each visual, saving hours on CFO dashboards with dozens of scorecards.
JUL 22 · 2026GANewSource ↗

Power BI July 2026 Feature Summary

Welcome to the July 2026 Power BI update!This month, we're introducing new capabilities across reporting, modeling, mobile, and embedded analytics. Highlights include expanded modern visual defaults, conditional formatting improvements for line charts and legends, new org app cap

Reports & Visuals
Why it matters(Marked not directly relevant for this audience.)
JUL 07 · 2026GANewSource ↗

Deep dive into the Shape Map in Power BI

Discover how the Shape Map visual (Generally Available) in Power BI helps you bring custom geographic boundaries, flexible map formats, and data-driven color formatting into your reports.

Reports & Visuals
Why it mattersShape Map lets you visualize data on custom geographic boundaries (districts, sales territories, custom regions) without relying on standard country/state geometries.
JUL 06 · 2026GANewSource ↗

Deep dive into tooltip options in Power BI visuals

Discover how Power BI’s tooltip (Generally Available) options help you tailor hover experiences—from curated field lists and sentence-style insights to fully custom report page tooltips.

Reports & Visuals
Why it mattersYou can now build interactive tooltip pages directly in Power BI instead of relying on static field hover-text, letting you embed charts, KPIs, and drill-through logic into hover states for richer end-user context without cluttering your main report canvas.

Service & Governance19 ITEMS

SEP 15 · 2026GANewSource ↗

Moving off ODBC — A self-serve scanner for your ADBC migration

If your Fabric workspace connects to an ODBC driver, and you haven’t already moved to the ADBC driver, you’re on the ODBC → ADBC migration path. The migration window is already open — the sooner you start, the more room you have to validate.What’s happeningPower Query is transiti

Connectors & Power QueryService & Governance
Why it mattersYou can now scan your Fabric workspace to identify ODBC connections and automatically assess migration complexity to ADBC before Microsoft deprecates ODBC.
SEP 14 · 2026GANewSource ↗

Diagnose Fabric Data Warehouse workloads with the SQL DW operations skill

When a warehouse slows down, the investigation usually starts with more questions than answers. Was there a capacity spike? Did a specific query suddenly become expensive? Are requests failing, being canceled, or simply taking longer than usual? Answering those questions often re

Service & Governance
Why it mattersYou can now directly inspect query execution times, resource contention, and failure reasons in Fabric Data Warehouse without manually tracing through logs or guessing where performance degraded.
SEP 09 · 2026GANewSource ↗

Get ready for table discovery in OneLake Catalog search (Preview)

In late September, OneLake Catalog will begin surfacing tables as searchable objects in Microsoft Fabric. This change expands which table metadata users can discover based on their existing item permissions, so administrators may want to review the related tenant setting before r

Fabric Warehouse & LakehouseService & Governance
Why it mattersYou can now search for and discover warehouse and lakehouse tables directly in OneLake Catalog without navigating through folder hierarchies, accelerating source-data validation when building semantic models.
SEP 08 · 2026GANewSource ↗

Fabric Influencers Spotlight: August 2026

Explore the August Fabric Influencers Spotlight featuring community-driven guidance, tutorials, AI use cases, and Power BI insights from Microsoft MVPs and Fabric Super Users. Discover practical examples of Microsoft Fabric in action across governance, data engineering, analytics

Copilot & AIService & Governance
Why it matters(Marked not directly relevant for this audience.)
SEP 08 · 2026GANewSource ↗

Advancing the Microsoft Fabric SQL Query Editor

The Microsoft Fabric SQL Query Editor is the home for web-based SQL development in Fabric. It gives developers a workspace to explore warehouse data, write and run SQL, among many more capabilities. That work rarely starts and ends with a single query. Developers navigate large s

Service & Governance
Why it matters(Marked not directly relevant for this audience.)
SEP 03 · 2026GANewSource ↗

Capacity Operation Events in Real-Time Hub (Preview)

Capacity Operation Events in Real-Time Hub is now available as a preview, giving Microsoft Fabric capacity administrators access to detailed, operation-level telemetry in near real time. Capacity Operation Events build on Capacity Overview Events by helping administrators mo

Service & Governance
Why it matters(Marked not directly relevant for this audience.)
SEP 01 · 2026GANewSource ↗

Get tenant-wide visibility into workspace networking policies with the Admin API

As organizations strengthen their security posture and adopt network security controls across their data platforms, visibility becomes just as important as enforcement. List Networking Communication Policies API, now generally available, provides Fabric Tenant administrators

Service & Governance
Why it matters(Marked not directly relevant for this audience.)
SEP 01 · 2026GANewSource ↗

New CI/CD resources for Microsoft Fabric: from concepts to end-to-end automation

Introducing a new set of resources that make it easier to build continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) into your Microsoft Fabric data projects. A Fabric solution is rarely a single artifact. It is a composition of workspace items, and with more than 70 item typ

Service & Governance
Why it mattersYou can now automate deployment of semantic models across dev/test/prod environments in Fabric without manual workspace management, reducing errors and release cycle time.
AUG 24 · 2026GANewSource ↗

Upgrade Power BI Dataflows Gen1 to Fabric Dataflows Gen2 with the Upgrade Wizard (Preview)

Upgrading Power BI Dataflows Gen1 is now easier with the Dataflows Upgrade Wizard. Now in preview for eligible workspaces assigned to Fabric capacity, the wizard provides a guided experience to upgrade Power BI Dataflows Gen1 items to Fabric Dataflows Gen2 (CI/CD). The wizard pre

Service & Governance
Why it mattersYou can now automatically migrate existing Power BI Dataflows Gen1 to Gen2 using a guided wizard instead of manually recreating pipelines and dependencies.
AUG 20 · 2026GANewSource ↗

Secure Azure Event Hubs Connections in Eventstream with Workspace Identity (Preview)

Connecting streaming workloads to Azure Event Hubs should not require teams to manage shared credentials. Organizations building real-time data solutions need a secure and manageable way to connect streaming workloads to event sources. With workspace identity support for Azure Ev

Service & Governance
Why it matters(Marked not directly relevant for this audience.)
AUG 12 · 2026GANewSource ↗

Capacity Overview Events in Real-Time Hub

Capacity Overview Events in Real-Time Hub is now generally available—enabling organizations to monitor capacity conditions, trigger alerts, and automate actions in near real-time.

Service & Governance
Why it mattersYou can now stream capacity utilization spikes directly into automated workflows—setting alerts when your CFO's dashboards approach throttling thresholds without manual polling of the admin portal.
AUG 11 · 2026GANewSource ↗

On-premises data gateway July 2026 release

The July 2026 release of the on-premises data gateway is version 3000.326. This new version (3000.326) continues our focus on improving gateway manageability, operational visibility, and enterprise governance while maintaining secure and reliable connectivity between on-premises

Connectors & Power QueryService & Governance
Why it mattersYou can now see deeper operational metrics and governance controls in your gateway infrastructure, reducing time spent troubleshooting refresh failures and access issues in your semantic models.
AUG 11 · 2026GANewSource ↗

Understanding Warehouse Consumption with Capacity Metrics and Query Insights

When reviewing warehouse usage, customers often start with the same question: which workloads contributed to the consumption I’m seeing in the Fabric Capacity Metrics app?With the updated consumption accrual model for Fabric Data Warehouse and the SQL analytics endpoint, the best

Service & Governance
Why it matters(Marked not directly relevant for this audience.)
JUL 02 · 2026GANewSource ↗

Workspace Outbound Access Protection (OAP) for Real-Time Intelligence (Preview)

Workspace Outbound Access Protection (Preview) for key Real-Time Intelligence experiences in Microsoft Fabric, helping organizations reduce data exfiltration risk while keeping common real-time ingestion, analytics, dashboarding, and automation workflows running. Read on to learn

Service & Governance
Why it mattersYou can now restrict which external endpoints your Fabric workspace can reach, reducing data exfiltration risk without breaking your Real-Time Intelligence pipelines and dashboards.
JUN 30 · 2026GANewSource ↗

Item Recovery in Microsoft Fabric

With Item Recovery in Microsoft Fabric (Generally Available), you can now recover deleted items across supported workloads, restore items through the Workspace Recycle bin or REST API, and configure tenant-wide recovery policies.

Service & Governance
Why it mattersRecover accidentally deleted Power BI semantic models, reports, or dataflows from a workspace recycle bin instead of rebuilding them from scratch.
JUN 29 · 2026GANewSource ↗

Secure Azure and Fabric Event Flows Across Workspaces with Outbound Access Protection (Preview)

Lock down cross-workspace event flows in Fabric: new Outbound Access Protection lets you control which workspaces can consume Azure and Fabric events—blocking unauthorized access by default until you explicitly allow the Real-Time Events connector.

Connectors & Power QueryService & Governance
Why it mattersYou can now block external workspaces from subscribing to your Fabric events by default, requiring explicit permission grants instead of open access.
JUN 25 · 2026GANewSource ↗

On-premises data gateway June 2026 release

 The June 2026 release of the on-premises data gateway is version 3000.322. This new version (3000.322) continues our focus on improving gateway manageability, operational visibility, and enterprise governance while maintaining secure and reliable connectivity between on-pre

Connectors & Power QueryService & Governance
Why it mattersYou can now monitor and diagnose on-premises data connectivity issues directly within your gateway management interface without escalating to infrastructure teams.

Fabric Warehouse & Lakehouse11 ITEMS

SEP 17 · 2026UpcomingNewSource ↗

Upcoming changes to legacy Teams and Outlook activities in Fabric Data Factory pipelines

Beginning October 30, 2026, users will no longer be able to add new legacy Teams or legacy Outlook activities to pipelines. These legacy activities will no longer appear as options when users add new activities to a pipeline. Existing legacy activity instances can still be edited

Fabric Warehouse & Lakehouse
Why it matters(Marked not directly relevant for this audience.)
SEP 02 · 2026GANewSource ↗

Connect securely to Snowflake in Fabric Pipelines and Copy Jobs

Snowflake is a common source and sink for enterprise data movement, and Microsoft Fabric Data Factory supports it in both pipelines and Copy Jobs. For organizations that restrict public network access, some additional considerations are needed to meet that requirement. You can ha

Fabric Warehouse & Lakehouse
Why it mattersYou can now move data between Snowflake and Fabric warehouses via private endpoints without exposing credentials in pipeline configurations.
AUG 26 · 2026GANewSource ↗

Fabric August 2026 Feature Summary

Welcome to the August 2026 Fabric update! Microsoft Fabric continues to evolve with new capabilities that help organizations build, manage, and scale their data and AI solutions more efficiently. This month's updates introduce enhancements across Fabric Platform, OneLake, Data En

Copilot & AIFabric Warehouse & Lakehouse
Why it mattersI need the complete summary text to evaluate this properly. The summary cuts off mid-sentence at "Data En..." Could you provide the full summary so I can write an accurate, specific one-sentence assessment of what this actually changes for a Power BI-focused BI analyst?
AUG 24 · 2026GANewSource ↗

Bring your Google Lakehouse Runtime Catalog data to OneLake (Preview)

Microsoft OneLake, the single, unified, logical lake for all of your organization’s data, can now work with more data sources! We’re excited to announce the new Mirrored Google Lakehouse runtime catalog item, now available in preview. Similar to our existing catalog mirrorin

Fabric Warehouse & Lakehouse
Why it matters(Marked not directly relevant for this audience.)
AUG 19 · 2026GANewSource ↗

Connectivity patterns in Microsoft Fabric: A guide for data integration workloads

This blog post focuses on connectivity options for Microsoft Fabric workloads that use Data Factory runtime components, including Dataflow Gen2, Fabric Data Pipelines, Fabric Copy Job, Fabric Mirroring, Power BI semantic models, and Power BI paginated reports. The guidance and ne

Fabric Warehouse & Lakehouse
Why it matters(Marked not directly relevant for this audience.)
AUG 13 · 2026GANewSource ↗

Introducing Fabric Lakehouse support in dbt job for Microsoft Fabric (Preview)

Fabric Lakehouse plays a central role in many Microsoft Fabric implementations, serving as the foundation where data is prepared, organized, and made ready for downstream analytics workloads. As more teams adopt dbt alongside Microsoft Fabric, a common goal is to bring transforma

Fabric Warehouse & Lakehouse
Why it mattersYou can now orchestrate dbt transformations directly against Fabric Lakehouse tables, eliminating manual handoffs between dbt jobs and your Fabric semantic model refresh pipelines.
AUG 03 · 2026GANewSource ↗

Change Event Streaming for SQL database in Microsoft Fabric (Preview)

SQL database in Microsoft Fabric already brings operational and analytical workloads together—now it can stream changes as they happen. Change Event Streaming sends inserts, updates, and deletes directly to Fabric Eventstream or Azure Event Hubs. Build near-real-time pipelines fr

Fabric Warehouse & Lakehouse
Why it mattersCapture SQL table inserts, updates, and deletes in real-time to Eventstream, enabling you to build live data feeds that power refresh-dependent CFO dashboards without nightly batch loads.
JUL 02 · 2026GANewSource ↗

Simplifying secure data access with Delegated OneLake Shortcuts (Preview)

IntroductionData rarely stays in one place. As organizations standardize Microsoft Fabric and OneLake, the same datasets need to be reused across teams, domains, workspaces, and increasingly across tenant boundaries. The challenge is no longer moving data; it is sharing it secure

Fabric Warehouse & Lakehouse
Why it mattersYou can now grant warehouse/lakehouse read access to users across tenant boundaries without copying data or managing separate credentials in each tenant.
JUL 01 · 2026GANewSource ↗

Supercharge your real-time data ingestion: What's new in Fabric Eventstream connectors

Discover the latest Fabric Eventstream connector updates—bringing stronger enterprise security, broader source coverage, and simpler real-time ingestion across private networks, Kafka, Service Bus, IoT Hub, Oracle CDC, and HTTP.Now available: Connector private network suppor

Fabric Warehouse & LakehouseConnectors & Power Query
Why it matters(Marked not directly relevant for this audience.)

Copilot & AI11 ITEMS

SEP 10 · 2026GANewSource ↗

Power BI Q&A retirement reminder: February 2027 timeline update

In December, we announced the retirement of Power BI Q&A, our legacy natural-language querying experience, with retirement planned for December 2026. To give current Q&A user's additional time to assess their dependencies and transition to newer Copilot-powered solutions,

Copilot & AI
Why it matters(Marked not directly relevant for this audience.)
SEP 10 · 2026GANewSource ↗

Lineage-aware AI with the Fabric item relations API (Preview)

With two new REST operations, you can retrieve the upstream and downstream relations of any Fabric item directly from your own code — the dependency graph behind the portal's lineage view, now available as a supported, programmable surface. Each response includes related items, t

Copilot & AI
Why it mattersYou can now programmatically query the full dependency graph of your semantic models and dashboards to build automated documentation, impact analysis tools, or governance checks that previously required manual lineage tracing.
SEP 02 · 2026GANewSource ↗

Fabric Data Agents in Microsoft Copilot Studio

Organizations can now bring governed business data from Microsoft Fabric into Copilot Studio agents, enabling agents to answer questions, generate insights, and support business processes using trusted enterprise data. Fabric data agents make it easier to ground experiences in th

Copilot & AI
Why it mattersYou can now embed Fabric data sources directly into Copilot agents, letting business users query your semantic models through natural language without building separate API layers or custom connectors.
AUG 10 · 2026GANewSource ↗

Build agent with AI for Data Agent (Preview)

Configuring a Data Agent can be challenging. To deliver reliable answers, authors must understand the data model, identify the right tables and relationships, write clear instructions, create representative examples, and test the agent until it meets user expectations. This proce

Copilot & AI
Why it matters(Marked not directly relevant for this audience.)
JUL 30 · 2026GANewSource ↗

Retirement of Fabric data agent integration in Copilot in Power BI

Nearly a year ago, we announced the integration between Fabric data agent and Copilot in Power BI, allowing users to access a Fabric data agent directly from Copilot in Power BI. This integration enabled users to explore report data and interact with data agents within the same w

Copilot & AI
Why it mattersYou can no longer ask Copilot in Power BI to query your Fabric data agents directly—you'll need to use Fabric workspace or agent interfaces instead.
JUL 30 · 2026GANewSource ↗

Microsoft recognized as a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Data Lakehouses

For years, organizations have invested in data platforms to understand what happened across their business. Dashboards, reports, and KPIs are now table stakes. But as AI becomes central to how organizations operate, the bar for the data lakehouse is getting much higher. The next

Copilot & AI
Why it matters(Marked not directly relevant for this audience.)
JUL 21 · 2026GANewSource ↗

Bringing Power BI Insights to Every Copilot User

The future of Power BI and Copilot starts by meeting users where they already work. We’re bringing trusted Power BI answers into Microsoft 365 Copilot first, so people can ask questions of governed business data in the flow of work — then carrying that richer, more conversational

Copilot & AI
Why it mattersYou can now embed Power BI semantic models as data sources in Microsoft 365 Copilot, letting business users query governed data conversationally without leaving Outlook or Teams.
JUN 26 · 2026GANewSource ↗

Use built-in Fabric data protection to get your data AI-ready

Every organization wants to put AI to work on its data. Copilot, agents, and generative AI promise faster insight, but they raise a hard question for security teams: If AI can reach all our data, what stops it from surfacing the wrong data to the wrong person? The

Copilot & AI
Why it matters(Marked not directly relevant for this audience.)

Connectors & Power Query03 ITEMS

SEP 17 · 2026GANewSource ↗

Soft delete for On-premises data gateways in Microsoft Fabric (Preview)

Deleting a gateway is currently permanent, so administrators must recreate it if it is removed accidentally. With soft delete, supported gateways are retained for 30 days after deletion, giving authorized administrators time to restore them before permanent deletion. Soft&nb

Connectors & Power Query
Why it mattersYou can now recover an accidentally deleted on-premises gateway within 30 days instead of rebuilding it from scratch and reconfiguring all dependent refresh schedules.
SEP 01 · 2026GANewSource ↗

Start validating today: The ODBC to ADBC driver transition in Power BI and Microsoft Fabric

Power BI and Microsoft Fabric are transitioning supported data source connections from legacy embedded ODBC drivers to Apache Arrow Database Connectivity (ADBC) drivers. ADBC provides standard interfaces for interacting with Arrow data, delivers significant performance impro

Connectors & Power Query
Why it mattersYou can now validate that your existing ODBC-based data source connections in Power Query will continue working after Microsoft's migration to ADBC drivers, preventing refresh failures in production models.
AUG 28 · 2026GANewSource ↗

On-premises data gateway August 2026 release

The August 2026 release of the on-premises data gateway is version 3000.330. The new August 2026 release of the on-premises data gateway (version 3000.330) continues our commitment to delivering secure, reliable, and manageable connectivity between on-premises data sources and Mi

Connectors & Power Query
Why it mattersYou can now refresh semantic models connected to on-premises databases with version 3000.330, which addresses security and reliability issues that previously caused intermittent refresh failures.