Power BI Development Pipelines

Power BI has a Premium Feature of Development Pipelines. This consists of three linked Workspaces, and content can be published between them and changes investigated and easily. The challenge has always been as a Premium Feature; it is not often demonstrated… until now!

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In this example, we used a Development Pipeline to manage the Data Model and Report content. With the data being held in a Dataflow, this is an increasingly common situation and causes significant confusion around Analytics. After all, in traditional development, we (ideally) use three environments – Development (Dev), Quality Assurance (QA) and Production, you may use more or even less, but you should be troubled by the idea of just developing in “Production”. Traditional BI tools have also often look at Dev or QA as they have been too cumbersome to develop without risking production reports. Power BI neatly sidesteps many of these issues. Then because production data pipeline endpoints are available, development of new content can be done against the “known good” of Production, so you end up with Dev, QA and Production all referencing or using Production Data. Overall this does not invalidate Development Pipelines. In fact, the change identification capabilities of Development Pipelines makes them ideal for tracking changes over time on your content.

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