Power BI

LLM tools: Likewise, you can use LLM tools to facilitate various aspects of report development, including the creation of custom visuals in DAX (via SVG visuals), R, Python, and Deneb.

Figma and Excalidraw: general-purpose design tools that you can use to facilitate the design for anything. For models, you might use Figma (FigJam, likely) or Excalidraw to create the conceptual or logical model for your semantic model during the design There are many other tools for doing this, including Visio or even the diagram view in Tabular Editor 3.

Tabular Editor: an end-to-end development tool that you can use either together with Power BI Desktop or as an alternative. Tabular Editor is an integrated development environment specialized for working with semantic models. It is designed from the ground up, to empower semantic model developers with everything they need to build good semantic models while being efficient.

Large language models (LLMs) and other generative AI tools

Power BI Desktop tools: New features and tools in Power BI Desktop also support a variety of use cases.

Power Designer

It is important to emphasize that you do not need to use any of these tools. Rather, you typically turn to them when you have specific problems that you want to solve, or scenarios that you aim to address

Two flavors of Direct Lake: Direct Lake on SQL endpoint is the “legacy” version of Direct Lake

Direct Lake on OneLake is a new mode that will be integrated with OneLake security.

model in Direct Lake is always stored on the cloud, and it does not store anything on the local computer. However, this integration opens up the possibility of using external tools and simplifies the introduction of other features, like the next one.

Composite models with Direct Lake and Import mode

you can mix tables in Direct Lake mode (also coming from different sources) and in Import mode.

does not create “limited” relationships between tables from different data sources

The table in Import mode does not have the current limitations of tables in Direct Lake

ill be possible to materialize a view on Lakehouse using SQL statements

: It will also be possible to create calculated tables and calculated columns based on tables connected through Direct Lake.

The semantic model will introduce the notion of “Calendars

The last announcement is the more important one for the long term. You will be able to write and use functions defined in DAX. These are called User-Defined Functions (UDFs), which you should not confuse with User Data Functions in Azure: the DAX UDFs exist in semantic models, are written, and can be consumed in DAX.