BIFocal - Clarifying Business Intelligence

This is episode 301 recorded on August 20th, 2025, where John & Jason talk with friends and fellow podcasters Andrew Connell & Julie Turner of the Code. Deploy. GoLive show about how this podcast is AC's fault in the first place, what they are doing with their new podcast, community, and general shenanigans to celebrate the BIFocal.show's 300th episode. For show notes please visit www.bifocal.show

This is episode 300 recorded on July 31st, 2025, where John & Jason talk the Microsoft Fabric July 2025 Feature Summary including tags in Fabric Domains, Fabric Data Agent integration with Microsoft Copilot Studio, enhancements to Activator, manual control of Auto-Refresh in pipelines, and CosmosDB in preview now in Fabric. For show notes please visit www.bifocal.show

This is episode 299 recorded on July 21st, 2025, where John & Jason talk the Microsoft Power BI July 2025 Feature Summary including expanded data sharing with Microsoft 365, Copilot updates, field parameters goes GA, Organizational Themes, and more. For show notes please visit www.bifocal.show

This is episode 298 recorded on July 9th, 2025, where John & Jason talk the Microsoft Fabric June 2025 Feature Summary including lots of Notebook updates in Data Engineering, lower cost for AI functions in Data Science, Copilot for RTI dashboards, and more. For show notes please visit www.bifocal.show

This is episode 297 recorded on July 4th, 2025, where John & Jason talk the Microsoft Power BI June 2025 Feature Summary including updates to Visual Calcs, Sparklines are now GA (after 4 years), Azure Maps breaking changes, Org Apps updates & revelations, and Power Query editing of Import models in the web.

This is episode 296 recorded on June 6th, 2025, where John & Jason talk the Microsoft Fabric May 2025 Feature Summary including a REST API updates for Fabric, updates to User Data Functions, Copilot in Power BI support for Fabric data agents, CosmosDB in Fabric, DataFlows Gen 2 CI/CD support is now GA,  updates to Data Pipelines & Mirroring, and much more. For show notes please visit www.bifocal.s...

This is episode 295 recorded on June 5th, 2025, where John & Jason talk the Power BI May 2025 Feature Summary including a new fabric roadmap tool, Copilot & AI enhancements, Translytical task flows, TMDL view enhancements, and more. For show notes please visit www.bifocal.show

This is episode 294 recorded on May 7th, 2025 where John & Jason talk the Power BI & Microsoft Fabric April 2025 Feature Summaries in a single episode.

This is episode 293 recorded on May 6th, 2025 where John & Jason talk the Microsoft Fabric March 2025 Feature Summary including Data Science, Data Warehouse, Real-time Intelligence, and Data Factory.

This is episode 292 recorded on April 22nd, 2025 where John & Jason talk the Microsoft Fabric February 2025 Feature Summary including Fabric Platform, OneLake, and Data Engineering.

This is episode 291 recorded on April 11th, 2025 where John & Jason talk the Microsoft Power BI March 2025 Feature Summary including Desktop start-up performance improvements, Copilot improvements, cool stuff with PBIP & TMDL, and lots of modeling improvements.

This is episode 290 recorded on April 8th, 2025 where John & Jason talk the news coming out of the Microsoft Fabric Community Conference in Las Vegas.

This is episode 289 recorded on March 21th, 2025 where John & Jason talk the Microsoft Fabric February 2025 Feature Summary including API updates, Monitoring changes, Security updates, and AI Skill enhancements.

This is episode 288 recorded on March 19th, 2025 where John & Jason talk the Microsoft Fabric February 2025 Feature Summary, specifically the Power BI section, including a new baseline version of Power BI Desktop, Copilot changes for Power BI, a trick to get conditional formatting for Visual Calcs working, and performance improvements for Direct Lake mode. For show notes please visit www.bifocal.s...

This is episode 287 recorded on March 13th, 2025 where John & Jason talk the Microsoft Fabric January 2025 Feature Summary including Python Notebooks in preview, Lineage enhancements to spark notebooks, lots of DBA enhancements to Data Warehouse, Tenant Level Private Link for Databases, and CI/CD preview for most of Fabric.

This is episode 286 recorded on March 12th, 2025 where John & Jason talk the Microsoft Fabric January 2025 Feature Summary, specifically the Power BI section, including Storytelling updates for the PowerPoint Add-in, Semantic Model version history,  TMDL view in Power BI Desktop, and more.

This is episode 285 recorded live in Stockholm on December 3rd, 2024 where John & Jason talk about the expansion of the Microsoft Fabric ecosystem announced at Microsoft Ignite and interesting conversations that have been had at ESPC about Fabric.

This is episode 283 recorded on September 4th, 2024 where John & Jason talk the Microsoft Fabric August 2024 Feature Summary.

This is episode 284 recorded on October 9th, 2024 where John & Jason talk the FabCon Europe 2024 and all of the announcements made there.

This is episode 282 recorded on August 23rd, 2024 where John & Jason talk the Power BI August 2024 Feature Summary including Ask Copilot questions against your semantic model in Desktop, Visual level format strings, DAX query view in the web, and the narrative visual with Copilot in embedded.

This is episode 281 recorded on August 9th, 2024 where John & Jason talk to Charles Webb, Principal PM Manager for Data Warehouse in Microsoft Fabric, about Fabric, Data Warehouse, his history with Power BI & Dataflows, AI, college sports & business, his work in philanthropy and much more.

This is episode 280 recorded on July 24th, 2024 where John & Jason talk to Josh Caplan, Principle Group Product Manager for OneLake in Microsoft Fabric, about Fabric, OneLake, Shortcuts and much more.

This is episode 279 recorded on July 11th, 2024 where John & Jason talk about the Microsoft Fabric, including Power BI, June 2024 Feature Summary including a Visual Calcs update, updates to downloading large semantic models, the new PBIR file format, and external sharing API for OneLake, a Spark Connector for Fabric Datawarehouse, and much more.

This is episode 278 recorded on May 24th, 2024 where John & Jason talk the news from Microsoft Build 2024 including lots of great new stuff for developers in Microsoft Fabric, Snowflake Apache Iceberg shortcuts, and the announcement of Real-Time Intelligence in Fabric.

This is episode 277 recorded on May 10th, 2024 where John & Jason talk the news in the Power BI space including Power Query support in paginated reports, Copilot Pane in Power BI Desktop & Copilot being available by default soon, and the announcement of support for reports in SharePoint & OneDrive with live connected semantic models.