DevOps and You, Your Team, and Your Data – Ep. 433

Mike and Tommy are joined by Mathias Thierbach to unpack what DevOps really means for Power BI and Fabric teams — beyond just CI/CD. They cover why source control is the starting line, where automated testing fits (and why Microsoft tooling is still thin), plus how PBIR/PBIP and modern file formats unlock collaboration at scale.

News & Announcements

The episode opens with a fun rant about Dataflow Gen2 adding SharePoint as a file destination, plus two Chris Webb posts focused on Copilot Search and Copilot AI Instructions.

Referenced Links

Two new C# Scripts for PBIR: Replace Fields & Open Visual Json files — A practical post with two small scripts that make PBIR work less painful: one helps replace fields inside a visual without breaking formatting, and the other helps you quickly locate the right visual.json when you need to tweak configuration. A nice reminder that once reports are “files on disk,” automation becomes the superpower.
Finding reports and semantic models easily with Power BI Copilot Search — Chris shows how the new Copilot “Chat with your data” experience isn’t just chat: it can help you find content by looking at report metadata and even text inside the report pages (not just the report name). The hosts love the capability but debate the idea that basic “search” is being positioned behind Copilot licensing.
Grouping and filtering in Power BI Copilot AI Instructions — A deeper, more actionable Copilot post that shows why you need to provide model-specific AI Instructions if you want reliable grouping/filtering behavior. The takeaway: Copilot can only be as good as the semantic context you give it; “good prompts” alone won’t save a vague model.

Main Discussion: DevOps and You, Your Team, and Your Data

Mathias Thierbach joins the show to help define DevOps in a way that makes sense for Power BI teams — especially teams that didn’t start as “software developers.”

DevOps is not a tool you buy

Mathias draws an important line early: DevOps isn’t Azure DevOps (the product). DevOps is a set of practices and a culture built around delivering:

Faster
More efficiently
At high quality

The goal is outcomes — not “more process.” If DevOps isn’t helping you deliver value to stakeholders, you’re doing it wrong.

Why it matters in Power BI now

Mike frames the pain most teams feel: PBIX files are effectively “all-in-one binaries,” which makes collaboration hard.

If you want real parallel work (Mike on page 1, Tommy on page 2, someone else on the semantic model), you need the artifacts to become source-control friendly. That’s why modern formats like PBIP/PBIR matter — they turn “report work” into something teams can review, diff, and ship with discipline.

Mathias shares how tools like pbi-tools (and newer innovations like TMDL) were born from the desire to bring proven software engineering practices into the Power BI ecosystem.

CI/CD is a slice of the pie

The episode pushes back on how often “DevOps” gets reduced to “CI/CD.”

Mathias argues CI/CD is important, but if you only focus there you can spend a lot of money building pipelines without getting the broader benefits:

collaboration workflows
documentation and integration habits
breaking down team barriers
testing and quality gates

Testing: essential, but still early in the ecosystem

Everyone agrees testing is part of “high quality,” but the current reality is:

The community is building tools
Microsoft is not (yet) providing a strong end-to-end testing story for Fabric/Power BI

The hosts call out common “death by a thousand cuts” issues that automated testing could catch:

report opens on the wrong page
a lingering filter wipes out visuals
broken visuals after a model change

Where to start: Source control

Mathias’ advice is blunt: if you don’t know Git, learn Git.

A simple entry point is enabling Git integration in Fabric/Power BI Premium workspaces so you can start seeing artifacts “as code” and understanding what changes when you click buttons in the UI.

Security and deployment realities

A major benefit of source control is that it stores metadata, not your actual ERP data (unlike PBIX, which can contain cached data). But that advantage immediately creates the next hard question:

How do you orchestrate data loads and environment-specific configs across dev/test/prod?

Mathias points out this orchestration gap is a major missing piece in Microsoft’s CI/CD story today.

Episode Transcript

Full verbatim transcript — click any timestamp to jump to that moment:

0:00 [Music] Good morning everyone and welcome Welcome back to the Explicit Measures podcast with Tommy and Mike. Good

0:32 Morning, everybody. We’re talking about some cool stuff today. How you doing, Tommy? Oh, yeah. Another good week, man. Another good week. All right, we’re going to jump in today. Our main topic today will be DevOps and you and then your team and also your data. Just unpacking this this story here around DevOps and data ops potentially. going into a bit deeper here. Before we get into our main topic today, Tommy, we have to get into some of the blog announcements. Tommy Tommy was major announcements. I I wouldn’t say you were

1:04 Ragging me, but you were definitely like Tommy, you were telling me I How did I miss this blog article that came out recently? It was on May 22nd. It was a couple last month, I guess. Tommy, you want to give us the introduction? What is What is this article you found? And what is your op opinion about this? Well, first off, game changer. I’m going to absolutely use this as a game changer rather. Oh my gosh, you better not. So, I don’t know how we missed this, but the t I’m just going to say the title. There’s no other way to do this. SharePoint file destinations. Yep. Is the first file destination for dataf

1:39 Flows gen 2. Whoa. What? What is going on here? So what this means is what we can do is we already know in dataf flows gen 2 we can push the data to a database a lakehouse various other like data sources. Well Microsoft wanted to take that one step further and now one of the destinations can be sharepoint in a CSV format. So I can basically take any data flow gen two and push that to a SharePoint folder and

2:13 Now I have more CSV files. if if you want to like do a data flows gen two push files to SharePoint and then go get those files from another PowerBI from an import somewhere like oh man. Okay, I’ll say this. I think it needs to be a feature that exists because people are probably asking for it. It probably needs to be out there. But on the other hand, I’m looking at this going, we really don’t want to be doing data flows genu back into SharePoint. There’s probably use cases for it. Someone’s going to

2:44 Complain about it and someone’s going to say, “Yes, this needs to be done for my organization. We’re we’re doing some data exportation something. It’s got to come from there.” But man, I really just dislike the whole SharePoint as a data set. like it there. It’s the sometimes it’s just the evil necessity because it’s just the worst case scenario but it still works to get data into PowerBI but why would I work so hard to get to dataf flow gen 2 and fabric and then put it back in SharePoint. Right. Right. Right. I I don’t

3:19 I I I I really would love for people to ask us or tell us why they’re going to use this or what this solves because everything about PowerBI is I can take all these dumb CSV files in a folder and centralize it and now I’m doing the opposite thing. That’s like Mike, I have a great new invention for you. a lot of people like scrambled eggs. I’m introducing the normal egg thing. this is we’re just going to eat that raw or you going rocky style. That’s actually a better way to eat it. It’s like no, no, no. There’s a process to get this tasting better. It’s

3:53 I I’m not I’m really intrigued if anyone saw this one. Oh, yeah. That’s what we need. So, I’m just going to throw this one out there. So, if you’re using this one, I would love to hear some comments in the chat or down below in the comments of this video. Are you interested or excited about SharePoint as a destination for dataf flows gen 2? And then I’d be almost also interested in what would be your use case. I would be really curious if you if you’re using it, why are you using this? Maybe there’s a bunch of users you have that don’t have access to PowerBI or don’t have access to a a fabric

4:26 Workspace. That may be that’s acceptable. I understand. But I’d also be curious to see what people are using it for. Yeah. And Donald, you make a great point. SharePoint is everywhere. almost every organization has some of that and and it probably is easier to get people to access data from there, but I just feel like there’s a better way. Okay, enough of that one. We we could talk about that. We could rag on that one all day. We are working the last sentence. I just got to mention it, man, because they’re not stopping. , this is just the beginning. Data flow 2 plans to expand filebased destinations

4:58 To other formats and platforms. So, , I’m not sure where else you’d want to go. your hard drive locally. Go back reverse gateway. You go back through the gateway back to your local machine. Let’s next year they’re going to, , I can’t wait till May 5th or what is it? April, April 5th, April 1st when they do the jokes. Dataf flows now being able to write to tablets, stone tablets, chiseled included like , let’s go backwards all the way in time. Oh, that’s hilarious. Dataf flow now knows how to write in hieroglyphics, right?

5:30 Yeah. Introducing dataf flows to notepad. And when we mean notepad, we mean you get mailed your data. Email email your data. No, you get it in a binder. You get in Oh, the binder. It’s it’s ma it’s shipped to you. It’s mailed to you. Exactly. The amount of cus you’d have to use to get that to work. Mailed data. Yeah. Yeah. All your cus for the whole month is used up in one in one export activity. Yeah. Yeah. All right, Tommy, what else do you have? You got a couple other news items here. One from Chris Webb, it looks like. Actually, two from Chris Webb because I love everything Chris Webb writes. he

6:02 Always writes honestly sometimes the most intriguing way he looking at a lot of the technology and they’re both around co-pilot with PowerBI. The first one is finding reports in semantic models easily with copilot search. And I think we’ve all struggled with this when we’re dealing with any AI model, but especially all the reports. I want to find a specific item in a report, not just the report, but there’s we know how much overlap with the word sales or whatever the case may be. Mhm. So what he actually does a few

6:35 Experiments and what he actually looks at is copilot also looks at the metadata not just the report name but the text in the report itself. So he has a report that’s named copilot with QA optimizations. And so not a really great report name, but on the first page, he has a big text title, just text visual that says the the farm sales report. So in co-pilot standalone, all he did is simply say, “Hey, find that report for Fruity

7:09 Farms.” And when Copilot returned, the first result was that co-pilot one. It didn’t look at the report name. it actually looked at the information, the context in the report itself. This is one that I’ve I’ve gotten really I’ve gotten a lot of push back from Microsoft on this stuff. , one of the things that when Copilot initially came out, it was a better well, it was a is a way of doing search. It could index things. It could get a bunch of information together. It could find those details for you. I got a lot of push back initially, Tommy, whenever I talked to Microsoft about this one.

7:41 They were like, “No, C-Pilot is not search. Don’t use co-pilot for search.” And here we are looking at a fullon like this doesn’t seem like it needs to have co-pilot in order for it to read what’s inside the files of Excel or sorry in the inside the files of PowerBI doesn’t feel like that needs to be a co-pilot level feature but it seems like it’s being manifested in a way that like oh look we can use co-pilot and use a search type capability we’ll add this enhancement around searching and oh by the way we’ll read the PBIR format not just the name of the files we’ll search

8:14 A couple more things. I think this is definitely a big win. I I really do find that this is going to be valuable, but if you’re going to charge me, so this is the thing. This is just search. This is just search through the files that are made in the reports. And yet now we’re charging ourselves more money to run a co-pilot search. It feels a little bit like a bait and switch to me here a little bit. Can’t we just have Azure indexing just work just fine on this and keep it cheap? Why do I have to go to co-pilot and spend tokens searching for things there? Anyways, feels feels a

8:47 Little bit weird to me here around the search part of this one. I get that it it needs to be done. This is definitely a feature people want. I think you want to be able to search for text inside the files or even to be for that matter, Tommy, you on visuals themselves, you want to even search through what data is showing up on those visuals. , it’s a lot of, , there’s a lot of metadata, tool tips, all that. And I totally get that. So, it’s a neat and and that’s that’s the interesting thing you bring up because I initially looked at this in my dumb self. Oh, that’s

9:19 Awesome. That’s great. , looking at what Chris Webb did, but to your point, Mike, , we’ve been doing search for years. Like, Bing has been around forever. It’s got this indexing service that sits on top of stuff and indexes all the information and provides you the best details. like why do I need copilot for this one? So the maybe maybe I’m missing something here. Maybe there’s something it’s happening behind the scenes here that’s just way more advanced that I don’t see. But when I look at this at a glance at the first glance, I’m like, cool, glad it exists. Don’t really love the fact that I’m getting charged co-pilot pricing to go

9:51 Find stuff. Yeah, especially that search has been in PowerBI since forever. Yeah, that little that little search window bar has shown up on top of the screen for quite a while. Anyways, I’m Yeah. All right. two dud articles. Tommy, let’s go to the third one. If co-pilot just does search, I’m going to be really upset with this most of the time. All right, here we can step up our news game a little. Okay, so how do you actually get Copilot to do more than just return a report or do search? How do you actually do something

10:25 More advanced than just return a table? So what Chris Webb is putting together is how do you actually give instructions to co PowerBI co-pilot to group and filter. Okay, now this feels relevant to me, right? This feels right. I like this idea. I think co-pilot should be the thing that you talk to. It helps you write a SQL statement that returns grouped, aggregated, and filtered data. So basically building a simple select wear clause in there makes a ton of sense. I

10:57 Think this makes a lot of sense to me. I I love the first thing he does is and this is so like we have to be so special with co-pilot. He simply does a bad example of a prompt where he says show sales of luxury houses in California. Yep. And he’s like sure enough the result looks like cryptic words that co-pilot returned back. Oh no, that’s hilarious. Like I don’t know what to do with that. And he’s simply saying co-pilot is doing what you asked, but there are not enough clarifications. So

11:31 Are you asking sales as a column, sales as a metric, etc. So he actually goes through starting with the columns that should be returned. if the user expects to see columns for transactions or in a certain order, it’s helpful to know your data too. He actually adds in AI instructions to simply say the source data comes from this this particular semantic model. The transaction table contains one row. The address property sold and he adds what columns in what order. so that’s the stuff that I like that that

12:04 Makes a ton more sense. And the thing is you would have you have to do that either for every prompt have to or that’s going to be what you do in your AI instructions. But this that tidbit, if you do read this, the AI instructions to achieve this. Yeah. I I would print that out, put it on your wall to remember this because this is going to be bar none the most essential thing for anything to work in copilot. Yeah. And that’s and that’s a really good way of thinking about this, Tommy, because that’s how I think about when I do start doing data things like you I

12:38 Very rarely go out and write a query without even looking at the data even once. I almost always start with a top 10 top 100 row of a table and then I get the lay of the land of okay what does this data look like then I start grouping then I start so when I’m doing exploration stuff in SQL it’s always a select star top 100 from a table and we start there right so unless your data really really well I think when you’re what what the co-pilot should do is it should basically say I’m trying you could communicate I’m trying to look for this data joined together on

13:11 These columns if you knew what you’re talking about. But then the copilot could say, “Look, I found this information. Here’s some simple queries I ran. Here’s how many distinct values we have in this column. Here’s how many like we have a join and the join matches, , 100% of the records.” Like things like that that it’s just going to be able to give you as like other artifacts. That’s a whole bunch of extra queries that the thing can just autogenerate and design and then report back the results and then not only give you the answer, but it gives you these little statistics with it. I think that would be really useful. And the problem

13:44 Is though, he knows the data because he he’s built it. He’s obviously someone who is comfortable working in that. For a lot of people, they may not all know all the properties and they’re going to ask business questions. They are going to ask for what are my top sales accounts or who do I need to ask? And unless that has been a finely tuned prepped model where you also know how people are going to ask all their questions, copilot’s not going to understand because it has to have that context on what the data and what

14:18 They’re referring to. Yeah. Donald in the chat here, I’m going to make a call this on this one because it’s this could be pretty funny as well. Donald says, “I always explore and prototype my data in Power Query.” And I would agree. Power Query is a great tool to explore, see the data, see data columns, get some data profiling. But now I would ask, are you sharing it in shape in SharePoint? Are you saving it down to SharePoint? So now I explore my data and I save it now to SharePoint. Just kidding. We’ll move on. All right, enough of our news items today. Tommy, let’s get into our main topic for today. , what is our main

14:51 Topic for today? We are talking about DevOps and us. We are always working on process and the technology. Obviously, we’re focused in our little data space. However, there is more than meets the eye in terms of how your data flows from source to the final input and both from testing from from development and to trust. And one of the big ways in software development that we as BI

15:24 People have taken a lot from oh Oh, speaking of that, Tommy, someone’s I think someone’s calling you. We got a call in here. let’s get our callin in here. welcome to the show, Matias Tarbach. Welcome. We have brought a guest with us today. So, Tong, I didn’t mean to interrupt you, but Matias has some things to say around DevOps, and we’d love to bring you on the show. Yeah, Matias, welcome to the show today. We appreciate you jumping in here and talking with us about DevOps. Let’s unpack this topic. How does what what’s going on here? So, , Tommy, I’m sorry I didn’t mean to interrupt you there,

15:56 But go ahead. Let’s let’s unpack DevOps Matas. Welcome. Yes. Hi. , good morning to you and everyone. And, , you happy and and excited to be on here. So, yeah, thanks for having me. And, , DevOps is something I live and breathe. So, , let’s have a good chat about it. No, I got to give Matias mad kudos here because he is a genius and, , there’s there’s always this time. So, I I’m a musician, or at least I try to be, and I try to play music with other musicians who are way better than I am.

16:29 Matias is way better than both Tommy and I put together. , he’s super smart, thinks things through way better than I do. I shoot from the hip a lot of times, but Matias has been the one created PBI tools. So, for those of you in the community who use PBI tools, Matias is the creator of PBI tools. Amazing. By the way, this was DevOps before PowerBI had any inclination of DevOps. We could we could rip apart a PBX file. Incredible. And then now also recently Tim is another child of your creation. Maybe give us

17:03 A little bit there like why why are these two things so important to you in TS and and how do these impact our DevOps? Big questions, right? , I’m I’m very grateful you mentioned Timnel because that’s certainly something I’m really proud of. because particularly because it’s actually having a good time right now, right? , we’ve got Tim there’s a lot of innovation happening and also a lot of excitement in the community it seems. , and it’s just fantastic. , when

17:38 You think about something that was a technical spec at some point and actually something very fundamental in terms of tech actually growing up and and and becoming an adult and and living on like that. So yeah, very good. so how well I’ve been excited about DevOps for practically two decades now. And yeah you mentioned PBI tools. PBI tools was created because I couldn’t help myself but to basically hack

18:14 PowerBI to to make it DevOps compatible. Right. Yeah. Yes, , at at the time when PBI tools came about and I started writing, I started coding on PBI tools between 2016 and 2018. Basically, this was this couldn’t have been further from the reality of PowerBI. So, what what did I do? , I basically broke into the PBX file format and made it possible to look

18:46 Inside, made it possible to to put it into source control, made it possible to see what when you’ve made a change in desktop, what does it actually look like inside , and then ultimately made it possible to apply good old practices from software development in terms of source control and CI/CD and and branching and merging and automated deployments all these things are related to DevOps. So and Timnel pretty much came out of that because whilst we

19:23 Had a file format for semantic models which was Tim Zil huge document TMSL and well they were not great for collaboration. they were not great for understanding diffs and so tindle was born exactly out of that need and so you didn’t mention PBI that’s that’s the that’s the the final piece

19:56 Missing in the puzzle. So PBI to PowerBI reports as in pages and visuals and bookmarks and all of that is like tindle to semantic models right it’s it’s the it’s the modern source control friendly file format that’s officially supported by Microsoft and and PBL in particular happens to be well documented using JSON schemas , so it’s it’s awesome in terms of thinking about

20:32 Putting some automation on top of it and and creating advanced tooling. , I think there’s a lot to come. , we talked about tim view, but I think ultimately there’s a lot more to come in terms of automation around PBR and and reports. , but at this point PB is still in public preview. Okay, good good call out there. Yeah, it is. It’s in public preview, but boy is it getting it’s getting a lot of love from the community. I absolutely love it. It’s it’s super enjoyable. And there’s there’s been a couple versions of PBIR. Again, I’m I work on building tools

21:05 Around the report side of things. There was like a PBR version one. Now we’re on PBI version two now. But boy, do I love the PBR format. So, let me just let me just step back here for for our audience who’s not like, “Oh, wow. We love DevOps. Like, we’re going to be all in on this.” So I’m going to maybe pull up here a bit a higher level here just for our audience that is is thinking about this like what is DevOps? Why is this so important? Why are we even bringing on a guest to do this? So let me just give a bit of my mental model around what DevOps is doing and and why Timle PBI are the Timsel why

21:43 Is all this so important to us. So when you look at a PowerBI file, when we save a PowerBI file, we have this PBX file, which is actually just a zipped folder of a bunch of other pieces, artifacts, little files inside it that we can’t really see. Microsoft makes it easy. We can save it, we can bundle it up, and we can ship it over to powerbay.com. Awesome. The trick here is if you think about what’s inside the report, this is how I mentally model think about this one. and gun matzas you feel free to correct me but I think of it when I look at all the individual pages every single

22:16 Object inside the report has some definition to it there’s there’s a visual that visual has data fields it has properties it has styling the size of it all these things need to be captured and Microsoft just said look we’re going to shove all this stuff into one big JSON file and then that’ll work they know how to programmatically read it computers are great at reading large files and parsing through things and no problem, not a big deal there. But me as a user or even a team of people, right, if it’s just one person working on the report or the semantic model, eh,

22:50 Not not that big a deal. , there’s there’s some there’s some argument to say it’s good to have backups of things so when you royally screw up your measure or you publish something incorrectly, you can go back in time and go back to that older version. But when Tommy and I start working on things together, that’s when it gets like to be a pain. Like I want to work on page one, Tommy wants to work on page two. Well, we can’t merge our changes. We have to, , I I’d have to like check out a file, do my changes, and then give the file back over to Tommy. Okay, Tommy, now it’s your turn to to do the changes. So, , when we think about

23:22 DevOps, I think about it in a in a collaborative way, the the larger your team gets, so leadership of our companies are going to be like, “Hey, we want to go quicker. We have all these little files that we have these PowerBI files that are laying around here and how do we get more people to glob on to doing the work. That means we need to take the file itself and break it into smaller pieces, right? What if Tommy could work on page one, Mike could work on page two and Matias you could go work on the semantic model? Like how that’s more efficient, right? That is we’re now not doing things in series,

23:55 We’re doing them in parallel. Sorry, Tommy, go ahead. You were going to say something. No, I was gonna say I I want to take a a little step back for a lot of people where when they hear DevOps I’m like what are we building in JavaScript and and like so like everything you said is completely right but I think a lot of people especially when they start with power that’s my mental model. Yeah for a lot of people that ain’t thing. So but there’s the a lot of PowerBI pros came into it not from a developer background. they were not building

24:26 Websites or applications or they front end or back end they did not know what either of those terms meant. So we obviously we knew there could have been a better way but we weren’t well we didn’t mis that’s the point here. So, and the nice thing about that was you didn’t have to be a developer so so to speak to do PowerBI. Now, introducing all of a sudden this influx and it’s really increased especially over the last years the idea of DevOps and data and they’re having this crossover.

25:01 My what I think is a lot of people’s misconception is the only people who should be doing that are people who are heavy enterprise developing data. So I guess for someone who is I listen I do PowerBI and listen we get a ton of mailbacks still that are just Can we just talk about PowerBI? If I’m just doing PowerBI why is DevOps something I need to know about? So who who are you going to ask that one to Tommy? I I’m going to leave it to the expert in the room here. So all right

25:33 Matias who who is DevOps good for everyone. , right. So, let me start with one thing. What what DevOps is not? Oh, that’s a good part. Yeah, let’s do that, too. I love it. So, Microsoft happens to have a product that’s called Azure DevOps, right? Yes. I wanted to make it very clear. It’s we don’t talk about that right now or at least not primarily it it obviously there is a bit of a connection here, but DevOps is not a

26:06 Tool. DevOps is not something you buy or you get a license for, right? So very very key. DevOps is a set of processes. You talked about collaboration. I would add testing. I would add quality to it. At the end of the day, from my point of view, DevOps is everything you do to deliver faster, efficiently, and at high quality. It’s those three qualities really. fast, efficient quality, right? and why why why are we talking about that,

26:41 Right? so I was in in the software world many many years before joining the data world. and in software engineering pe there’s a lot of history in teams and people and very smart people coming up with with better solutions for things right so we’re probably going back 30 years or so this is where DevOps is coming from in the software world teams have

27:14 Established those principles and have evolved them and have become better and better at delivering fast at scale with high quality. And so we’re talking about this because we would be foolish not to try to build on top of that, right? Yeah. What what software teams need and have needed is to a large degree what what data teams need as well. so so why would we want to repeat their mistakes?

27:47 Why would we want to reinvent the wheel? Why would we start from scratch? , there’s so much evolution in a digital world. let’s learn from that. And again, it turns out that , a lot of the tools and practices and principles and processes are actually applicable in the data world. as long as and this is how we come back to PBR tools and timle and all of that as long as stuff goes into source control and that’s that’s really the underlying piece and we we

28:20 Need to make sure that anyone wanting to take on some some of the goods of DevOps fully embraces source control. without that you’re not going to get very far. So I want to also be very clear here as well. I think I think there’s a lot of language from Microsoft around CICD like I hear a lot of so and I think I think also Matias some here I think sometimes especially with the way

28:51 Microsoft is communicating what’s happening in this DevOps space. We’re talking about DevOps Donald again you’re you’re spot on. DevOps is something that you are, right? It’s like a noun, right? I am part of the DevOps that that’s what we do. , I like that thought. But DevOps is like a a principle. It’s there’s ideas behind it. We’re talking about fast, efficient, and with high quality. Like that makes sense to me. It’s more like a it’s it’s a process that we’re integrating with. How can we build software in a in in a

29:24 Vicious way? However, we talk about continuous integration, continuous deployment, CI/CD. That’s a language I hear a ton out of Microsoft’s mouth all the time, but I don’t think CI/CD is the full story of what is DevOps. It’s like a part of it. It’s definitely required to be a piece of it, but it’s not the whole thing. And then I’m going to go kick it back here to Matias to you, and we’ve talked on this a little bit here. What’s your perspective on CI/CD in comparison to DevOps? Very good point. And to be honest, I’ve

29:57 Been getting a bit frustrated personally about the overuse of CI/CD in in in our space. Right. I think a couple months ago I even posted exactly on that on LinkedIn. yes. saying I think there’s a bit too much emphasis on CI/CD which actually is just a technology. , CI/CD is is a very particular set of tools and technologies that came out of DevOps.

30:29 So, it’s very much part of it, but it’s not the whole thing. And I think key if you want to get all the benefits, , Donald very nicely said better, stronger, faster. If you want to get all those benefits, merely focusing on CI/CD is not going to get you anywhere. In fact, I would argue if you just focus on CSD, you’re going to spend more money and and without actually getting necessarily other benefits, right? So, DevOps is about DevOps is many people say DevOps is a culture or a

31:03 Methodology. It’s all it’s it’s very holistic, , it’s about breaking down barriers. It’s about creating cross functional teams. It’s it’s about dividing work in in smart ways. It’s about integrating and automating. so which is why I mentioned just getting a license for Azure DevOps is is is not sufficient. this this is really about rethinking how do we actually how do we produce something

31:37 Meaningful as a team and how can we do that at scale I like and once you start thinking about that it it trickles down because then you have lots and lots of sub problems to solve both in terms of technology and tooling but also in terms of collaboration etc and yeah We are so lucky today that there is so much evolution we can all learn from, . so let’s do that. That’s that could that should be

32:10 The takeaway for people. I love that takeaway. Tommy, reactions. What are your thoughts on this? It it’s interesting that the big theme there is the collaboration side of things because honestly when there’s a blog article around the CI/CD or just around de source control it’s always it can be very intimidating for a lot of people and it’s it’s heavy for around the developer you’re under need to have some certain set of skill applications and understand that technical process to

32:42 Achieve it and I think that’s what people just think you have to do It’s my way to take a ton of files, go through the code, and , I know I have to write in a terminal. That’s what people think, but what we’re hearing is no. If you want to collaborate to the fullest, not just we’re going to create process for process sake, but if you want to collaborate as the best you possibly can remotely, then this is the way to go. And I I’m I I hesitate to ask a few

33:15 Questions here because No, don’t hesitate. Go ahead. Do it. This makes a lot of sense for and this will be my I’ll take the other side here, but this makes a ton of sense especially when you are dealing with things like such as repositories that are heavily where there’s a lot of dependencies around files. There’s a ton of configuration that’s involved and I think a lot of people are like you’re taking something easy like a PowerBI report that I can drag and drop and now

33:47 You’re almost like the SharePoint to data files like and now you’re making it a ton of different files and now you’re splitting errors and there’s a different schema there’s dependencies. Listen, I’ve thrown a mouse already because of some transaction was not available because of the getit didn’t whatever happened in source control. I’m going to open a report. And so we’re trying to again open this binary file, but we’re dealing with it on source control where most DevOps things and correct me if I’m

34:19 Wrong, but usually in DevOps, you’re not working in the application that you’re trying to build. Like that’s the end goal, if that makes sense. you’re talking from the software side of things, right? Like you’re saying like if I’m building a piece of software, right? Right. I’m not also using that software to build to build my end goal. Whereas what we’re doing with with PowerBI especially well I have all this schema and definitions but I’m also opening up PowerBI desktop and modifying. Can I come in here? Yeah. Yeah, go ahead.

34:52 Because I’m a bit worried we’re focusing too much on the inputs here, , schemas and and files and and commits and whatnot. I think the whole point of this culture change that DevOps is supposed to bring us is actually a big perspective change. You want to think about outputs, right? Why are we in a data space, , why are we working in PowerBI or fabric? because ultimately we’re delivering value to some stakeholders ideally seuite

35:28 Who are going to get insights from dashboards and reports and whatnot right and so the whole point of DevOps and everything related to it is really about how do we get them what they need better faster stronger there we go reading from donut there. right so so this is this is what it’s all about. and it only f if you then start thinking

36:00 About this what does that mean? so for instance right one thing that immediately follows is you need to test right if if you’re giving something to your group CEO or so you better make sure that they’re looking at the right number%. So testing needs to be part of this. you can always test manually. Does that scale? Is that efficient? No. So in an ideal world, you invest in automated testing, right? So that’s a big part of

36:32 DevOps. same thing is you mentioned collaboration. This is all about scale, right? do I do I have one person working on adding in a a new visual with a new measure or do I have a team of a hundred possibly across different time zones right if it’s a ladder which in in all practical context is usually what’s required we have a whole range of new problems in terms of how they

37:04 Collaborate how do you divide up the work what are dependencies how do you document what you’ve done how you integrate. And so, , this is where the whole DevOps movement has developed tools and practices how to make those things, , viable and feasible and manageable, but only because the end goal is to actually have better outputs, right? And so that’s really key here. , , to to to think what am I delivering? What’s the value I’m

37:37 Actually shipping? and if I think I mentioned cross functional teams earlier, right? I’m a big proponent of that and I think it’s really important having someone who is very close to the end users very well attached to the engineering team from my point of view is super important just engine I’m an engineer myself at heart right I know I can I can really lose myself in in in lines of code and I can I can

38:11 Go all in and love it ultimately that’s not what creates the value we are here to to ship and so having someone who who reminds every single engineer on a daily basis why we’re doing that I think is is is also part of it and sorry I’ll go ahead just one more thought right no it’s a great thought I love these thoughts if you look at if you look at the history of it right dev ops is obviously merging two different concepts

38:45 Together, right? So, the whole history of how DevOps and also the concept of DevOps came about was because historically you had this very strict delineation between developers and operations people, right? And so breaking down those barriers was huge because traditionally business had not worked like that. And so this this mindset is something we should we should still embrace today right break down barriers bring in even to the low-level developer

39:20 What the ultimate goal is here and and remind them of that I want to tag on as you’re saying these things Matias I’m I’m immediately thinking about a conversation I had with someone I don’t I I apologize I don’t remember who it was I can’t remember when it was happening but someone was telling If you think about your development team, PowerBI, software, it doesn’t matter what it is, there’s going to be people on your team that are the seniors, people that know everything, how to do all the all the experiences there. And so, one of the reasons we think about DevOps, talking to this

39:53 Better, faster, stronger concept is how do you scale your smartest people? like the people at the top of your development, the ones who know the semantic model really well, they’re tuning it, they’re making it very performant. How do you So again, back to our point here, what happens when we need a bigger team? What happens when we need more work done? What happens when we need more reports completed? Listen to anyone in the Powerbased space. You want a nice good se running semantic model and you want not just one cuz a onetoone relationship between semantic

40:25 Model and reports not as efficient. I’d rather have a semantic model that could answer multitude of questions, many reports on top of that semantic model. And as we think about data products we’re trying to produce, the best thing to do is how can I have a very highly effective semantic model and serve that to the self-service business that can then go build their own reports on top of it. So like you you’re now saying, okay, we have a team of engineers who are going to build various pieces of this data platform system. those leaders, those the the ones who

40:59 Are getting paid the most. It’s it’s most cost effective if you put them in positions where they’re building tests, writing automation, using the DevOps process to ensure that all the junior developers on the team or the newer developers to the team that their work meets the standards of the senior. And so I I don’t maybe Matias you and I or maybe maybe it was us who were I can’t remember where it was happening here but there’s this whole concept of like we’re potentially underutilizing our smartest most brilliant developers

41:35 Here because we have them going in and they’re fixing pages and reports because someone moved the visual, a measure was broken and the visual broke. Like that’s not what those users should be doing. And I think about John Kursky and what he’s doing with like playright and how he’s using it on top of reporting with some like automated testing of things like how can we detect when a report has a broken visual automatically with a test, right? These are the things I shouldn’t have to pay someone to put eyes on a report to see if everything works. I should be able to automate

42:06 That. And your most brilliant, smartest people should be figuring out how to solve that with automation. One, it keeps your talent there because you’re giving them the hardest problems. And then two, every single junior developer now has this keyhole funnel. I don’t know what you want to call it. There’s this now there’s a there’s now a requirement that they need to go hit in order to get things out the door. And so that increases the entire team’s output and productivity. Nothing gets through the door with errors. I can’t tell you

42:39 How many times we’ve been in organizations. I’ve walked in, we’ve built stuff, someone else has built things and it gets shipped out and the feedback comes back. We’re on the wrong page. You you sh you saved it on page two. It should have been on page one. Okay, let’s go fix that. Oh, you you accidentally left a filter in the filter pane on, which now when I go into the report, there’s now no data. Like, shoot. Okay, go back to the report, erase the filter, save it, then ship. Like these are things we should be able to easily test for and make sure that when this report goes out it’s on this page there are no filters in the filter

43:12 Pane or if there is one it’s only the last 30 days or whatever the requirement is right those but you want those things set the rules and walk away. Can I add one thing cuz Yeah, go ahead. I I do I do agree seniors in charge of automating tests. Absolutely. Let’s also add pair programming and mentoring because you make it make it sound like you’ve got two worlds, , of seniors and juniors and they’re not allowed to to interact other than through fading test or so, right?

43:46 So, I would definitely say part of DevOps culture is to actively mix, , do do pair programming sessions, actually have people sit side by side, which can also be done virtually. and and and pass on things that way. But generally I do I do agree with you. Yes. Well, and I I like this idea of of the mixing here. I was I was just hearing a a little YouTube short. I just watch YouTube way too much. But this morning I was literally watching a YouTube short and they were talking

44:18 About the the I think it’s the Marines and the Marines self-organize for meal time. And when whenever it’s meal time, the newest individuals, the ones that have the lowest rank, always go first. And the one who eats last is the most senior person. And the reason they do that is they want to make sure that all of the senior individuals are looking after the new individuals. How do we make sure everyone is fed, cared for? There’s a there’s a a respect that is we we want to instill a culture of

44:52 People who know what they’re doing. we must help guide mentor the newer members of the group. And I think it’s a great great principle. Love it. Tommy, reactions, thoughts. I really don’t want to. , you can’t say something about the Marines and I and I disagree, but no, I Good luck, Tommy. They sound no but I I just want to put this in a little greater context here. One from my end I agree with everything you said but here comes the butt but but

45:27 Thing you are assuming that the marines are in place at a lot of organizations. And when we’re talking about the someone starting with starting with s source control starting with devops and they have been doing powerbi there is no foundation for it then this gets a little difficult Mike it’s funny because you were bringing up the testing solutions out there none of them are endorsed by Microsoft and even though we have git and fabric it is still way limited in terms of how we can test for things and what most

46:01 What most source controls can do. So the thing is we really h we have git but we don’t have what usually like that those other features without a ridiculous amount of hacking custom nothing. Let me jump on your testing comment him because I like your testing comment a lot Tommy there is a couple tools the community has built to aid with this a little bit and I think we’re going to start seeing more and more of this coming out as well. , I think Matias has words on this as well, but I I’ll just point out I think I think this idea of testing a

46:36 Report or being able to apply tests back to a report. When I whenever I go to a conference, people who are speaking about this topic, testing of things, how to automate some of this, those sessions are always packed. They’re always got a lot of people in there. Cuz I think cuz I think Tommy, you’re talking about something here that’s striking a nerve. It’s hitting people that are that are in that space that are really like it’s simple things. What like I guess one of the yeah so Matis I think you shared a

47:09 Link here. So Nat Nat Van I don’t remember his name exactly how to say his whole name but he is a gentleman who is he’s made a PowerBI inspector tool. so it’s a it’s basically a tool over on GitHub and you can you need a framework to be able to write the test and then another bit of technology to then run the test and just verify something is correct against whatever that thing may be. Really cool idea but there there’s there’s not a lot of micros to your point Tommy there’s not a lot of Microsoft driven tooling that’s

47:41 Going to do this and I don’t think they are going to do it honestly I think they’re going to leave it up to the community to figure these things out. Sorry I’ll pause there. Yeah. And I I don’t want to go too much in the weeds with testing. where would you even put testing in terms of that journey for a team or a user when it comes to I they’re listening today and you’re like what DevOps and me that is something I want to do. This is a this is a a road I want to go down. At what point does that become serious from

48:14 The testing point of view? And and I guess I don’t want to change the subject too much here, but where do I start? Where do I want to focus and get started right away if what I I do want to dance with this DevOps at my organization. I love it. So but I don’t know what steps to take first. Well, two very distinct questions, but let’s start with the with the latter. , how do I get started? I mentioned it before, right? None of that works without source control. So that’s

48:46 The very first thing. if you don’t know Git, you better go and learn it, right? This is one of the most fundamental skills you everyone’s got to have if if they’re in in working with some digital products. no excuses. It’s it’s it’s got to be done. it and well you can start in in fabric PowerBI you can you can you can start quite easily just by enabling git integration if you want to that doesn’t require any refactoring

49:19 Doesn’t require completely rethinking your projects you can just go into existing workspaces and and and have the the artifacts pushed to to GitHub or Azure DevOps at least as a starting point I’m not necessarily you’re proposing that that’s the final the the ultimate solution here. But it’s it’s a very neat and cheap and easy way for you to have a view of what do those things in that workspace look like from as code right so seeing seeing things as code understanding

49:54 What the code behind a notebook or behind a semantic model or behind a report or behind a lakehouse or so what it looks like and what it means means and and how it changes if you if you click certain buttons, , if you make certain changes in your workspace. that that that’s definitely a required and and a really useful starting point. but coming to your testing question then that that that’s having

50:30 Automated tests in place is is definitely on the other end of the scale I’d say, right? so one because we have relatively poor tooling in place we’ve got a few bits and pieces mostly from the community and everyone who has contributed is is a real hero. but generally let’s say that space has a lot of scope for innovation to put a positive spin on it. it does also doesn’t seem that Microsoft has any interest in that

51:02 Space. So, you’re going to have to look elsewhere. and if you then want to integrate testing tools, you’re going to have to go to a CI server where you basically run your own pipelines, right? this is again not something that natively sits in Fabric or PowerBI. There may well be some custom workloads from from some ISVS at some point, but today you’re going to have to basically use your own

51:39 Pipeline runner. yeah. And can I can I ask there’s a question that actually came in. I think that’s really relevant and actually relates to your point here. I think Matias is what you’re describing here is a little bit. , one of the things that we we like around the git experiences here is when we use the PBIP format, when we use like the technology that the the the DevOps portion of this, how do we secure the data connection away from the PBX file that we’ve been traditionally using? So, , I guess up until this point,

52:11 I’ve been doing a lot of take a take a PowerBI PBX file, save the file, and push it on SharePoint. With that file goes all the data that I saved into it. when we move into this new world dic PBIP formats what happens here and how does that from the data connection standpoint how does that secure us this is this is another security like another asset we haven’t talked about yet on the like about this around DevOps but like there is a security piece to this as well if I have access to the SQL server to go get the data and and refresh my

52:44 Model to work on it but Tommy does not does that mean we can’t work on the same thing again can we still like maybe unpack that a little bit from the question here. How how do we secure the data and how does this new format help us secure the connection and who’s actually allowed to touch the connections? Good question. And in fact, this is one of the big benefits you’re going to get from from from from having a source control approach because by definition, if you use source control, you’re only going to have metadata in there, right? you’re not going to have your your your

53:18 Company’s ERP database in there as in the actual tables and columns and rows. so unlike in a PBX world where potentially a PBX file actually contains u at least a portion of your database, right? So security-wise from from from a data security point of view it’s it’s a huge benefit already. However, sadly, we’re also inheriting a new problem here. which is

53:54 Anyone who’s talking about deployment pipelines and git integration in in fabric will get to immediately because it means well where is the data ultimately coming from right so you need to think about orchestrating data load which is sadly something Microsoft is completely missing in in their own CI/CD picture. So that right now requires manual intervention which is a massive antiattern from a devops point

54:27 Of view. and it requires you in if if you want to put pipelines and and and CSD pipelines in place to figure out how to orchestrate data load. so that again is not something you can easily get off the shelf today. it’s not something you can just click a few buttons

55:03 And and you get that. for full transparency if if I may I actually started a new venture end of last year company navigator and this problem is exactly what we’re focusing on. So we are working on on a Azure and fabric focused DevOps product which is meant to bring all the good all the benefits from from DevOps to a really wide range of customers

55:40 By taking away those pains of setup and configuration and and figuring stuff out. So it’s meant to bring it’s meant to bring the the the the best practices, , evolved in the industry to people via a tool that pretty much guides them through the process. so it it’s something I’m working on and we’re

56:12 Working on something I’m extremely passionate about as you can imagine. But yeah, we’re doing that precisely because it’s way too hard today, . Yes, I’ve personally I’ve personally been setting up CI/CD pipelines for practically 20 years now. Yeah. And I So you could argue, , I I know that stuff a little bit. and and and I still find it way too hard having having and you’re the expert to put that in

56:45 Place for any new project today. Right. So in a way our product is is solving my own personal problem because I want this to be easier right and particularly I want to be able to give this to teams that can’t afford to spend 10 years learning stuff they should just be able to get the best practices in a in a readym made tool so there we go let me just I love that that story and I think that’s it’s I Matias, your your need born out

57:18 Of this DevOps thing. This is the same need I had with like working with JSON theme files. Like I too difficult. Like I it needs making complex things simple is actually quite challenging. So with this I I do want to kind about just about at time here. So I do want to start wrapping. let’s just do quickly final thoughts through everyone here. I’m I’m going to just go on a limb here a little bit. Look and say look DevOps is is way more than CI/CD. I think is the main point I want to make out here. CI/CD is something that Microsoft’s talking a lot about right now. DevOps is a much bigger story on

57:51 This. I think this pattern or learning about this or educating yourself on this space is something everyone should be doing in the PowerBI space. I think this is something that everyone can benefit from. I think there’s also easy entry points to some of this. Again, it may not be the full, , DevOps experience that we that we’re going to maybe talk about here in the podcast, but at least get started because if you never take the next step, you’re never going to get further and become more efficient and get better at this. So, for me, some team experiences,

58:24 Just turn on the git synchronization between your workspace and the git repo. That that might be just as much as you need. It’s a UI. It’s already built into PowerBI. Once you’re on anything premium, it could be premium per user or anything fabric pu all the stuff. As long as you just turn it on, you’re notified when something’s different compared to what’s inside the git storage area for your files. And I think we’re going to continue to see tools for the community. Again, we’re going to keep talking on it cuz we think it’s so incredibly valuable here. It’s easy to

58:57 Get started. Just start the journey. You’re going you’re going to find value from it, but if you don’t ever think about it learning it, you’ll never get anywhere. , let me kick over to Tommy. What’s your final thought here, Tommy? Yeah, I’m really excited for the next few episodes to really be diving into this more. , I think the misconception is that it’s all source control, but and understand it’s just sounds like more work rather than just opening an application and publishing it. But I think the biggest thing here is if you care about what you do and all

59:30 The times we have had to backtrack not even just when we make mistakes but listen this is the way I the I think our industry is going. It was nice while it lasted when we had just a binary thing to work with. But honestly with all the other things that are in fabric and just become more prevalent, there’s going to be a point of either get on the bus or because we’re leaving the station and I really think this is just going to be part of our normal workflow. Agreed. Matias, any final thoughts here as we

60:03 Wrap on our first topic here around DevOps? approach git learn control. Again, there’s no way around it. If you want if you want to really embrace this as a as a different way of thinking and culture and you want a slightly lighthearted approach to it, there’s a book recommendation. you should read the Phoenix Project which is a novel about DevOps and all all the things that can go miserably wrong if you don’t actually follow

60:37 Good DevOps practices. , yes. So, if you if you just want to get into that mindset and and wanna want to learn about it, , , in a light and and enjoyable way, , read the book. It’s it’s like 100 pages or maybe a bit more. And it’s definitely a it’s it’s a classic. Let’s put it that way. The Phoenix Project. Excellent. Love it. So, let me I’ll put that link for that book. , The Phoenix Project. It’s written by Jen Jean Kim Kevin and George Spafford. I got it all

61:13 About it DevOps and helping your business win. I love it. All right. So, I’ll put that here in the chat window as well just in case you haven’t read it. I’m sure some of our readers would love to see it. So, I’ll put that out there in the chat window. there’s a link for that out there in case you want to go check it out. Great recommendation the book. and and again, we’re the ones in the thick of it. We’re the ones in the technical experts in this area here. We’re going to have to do some convincing to leadership to like get them to buy into this. Leadership should already be bought in. They should already know this is the way to go. , but I think sometimes it requires some convincing. And how many sideways

61:47 Projects do you need to start really thinking this is a better way? Love it. Great conversation today. Thank you very much, Matias, for joining us as always. Thank you. Yeah, we appreciate it. , thank you for listening everyone on the podcast. We know your hour of time is valuable. We hope this was tickling your ear, giving you some things to think about on your run or your bike or whatever. We hear a lot of feedback by people, man, my run is just so boring, but we we love the podcast to to entertain our mind while we’re running or doing our exercise. So, congratulations on working a whole hour of exercise with us. We appreciate you.

62:20 You’re doing great. Keep going. with that being said, if you did like this episode, if you like what we’re talking about here and learning things that are new, please share with somebody else. We’d love for you to communicate this podcast to other people as well. Tommy, where else can we find the podcast? You find us on Apple, Spotify, wherever get your podcast. Make sure to subscribe and leave a rating. It helps us out a ton. Do you have a question, idea, or a topic that you want us to talk about in a future episode? Head over to PowerBI podcast. Leave your name and a great question. And finally, join us live every Tuesday and Thursday, 7:30 a.m.

62:54 Central on all PowerBI tips social media channels. Thank you all very much and we’ll see you next time. Thank you. Bye. [Music]

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