Power BI

Secure embed codes - allows easy sharing of Power BI reports. The public embedded codes - publish to web - has been out for a while that allows you share the Power BI reports that the anyone on the Internet (unauthenticated members of the public) should be able to see. The key difference is the secure part of the name. Users will need to authenticate, this does of course mean they will require either a Power BI Pro license or the report will be using the Power BI Premium capacity. The is an ideal way of sharing Power BI reports within a corporate intranet or SharePoint site without exposing the data to wider world.

Shared and certified datasets - One of the cool features is you can connect to already published Power BI datasets from the Power BI Desktop. The problem with feature is Power BI nature. Self-Service. Over time the number of data sets will grow, you’ll end up with a large number of a very bespoke and one-off datasets and the “golden” dataset will be hidden away amongst all those datasets. Certified makes it easier for organizations to steer users toward trusted and authoritative datasets. Certifying data sets is limited a user group at the tenant level.

SQL Server

Another month, another Cumulative Update (CU) for SQL Server 2017. CU13