February 18, 2026
Hiring the Report Developer – Ep. 503
Mike and Tommy unpack what a report developer should know in 2026 — from paginated reports and the SSRS migration trend to the line between report building and data modeling.
Author
Tommy Puglia
14 posts
February 13, 2026
Trusting In Microsoft Fabric – Ep. 502
Mike and Tommy dive deep into whether Microsoft Fabric has earned our trust after two years. Plus, the SaaS apocalypse is here, AI intensifies work, and Semantic Link goes GA.
February 12, 2026
Central BI & Workspace Strategies - Ep. 501
Episode 501 covers the new OneLake Catalog updates, AI's impact on workplace productivity, and strategies for organizing workspaces in Power BI.
February 12, 2026
Late Adopter Advantage? AI Readiness - Ep. 499
Is being late to the data game actually an advantage? We explore AI readiness, the power of coding agents like OpenClaw, and why the conductor's era is here.
January 29, 2026
Define the Problem Before Tools – Ep. 498
Mike and Tommy tackle a mailbag question about defining problems before choosing tools — and why goal setting matters more than ever in a world where AI lets you build anything. Plus, the January 2026 Fabric feature updates drop with 17 noteworthy items.
January 28, 2026
Remote Fabric Jupyter & Local VS Code – Ep. 497
Mike and Tommy dive into a listener mailbag question about connecting a local VS Code desktop to a remote Fabric Jupyter kernel — unpacking the tradeoffs of local vs. cloud development, custom environments, cost optimization, and why OneLake File Explorer might be the missing piece. Plus, AI-generated music as a metaphor for the future of data engineering.
January 23, 2026
Experience Overuse – Ep. 496
Mike and Tommy tackle a listener mailbag question: is the word 'experience' being overused in the Fabric and Power BI world? Plus, a surprise January Power BI Desktop release and Mike gushes about deployment pipeline improvements nobody announced.
January 21, 2026
Do You Really Need Fabric? – Ep. 495
Mike and Tommy unpack a viral LinkedIn article where a consultant saved a client $57,000 per year by moving from Fabric F64 to Premium Per User — sparking a bigger conversation about when Fabric actually makes sense, licensing confusion, and the tipping points that justify the investment.
January 16, 2026
MCP Your Fabric Data – Ep. 494
Mike and Tommy unpack Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers for Power BI and Fabric — what they are, how to use them, and whether organizations should be turning them on today. Plus, a deep dive on what makes AI agents actually useful versus just impressive.
January 14, 2026
AI Drives Fabric Success – Ep. 493
Mike and Tommy kick off 2026 asking the big question: will AI drive Fabric's success? They share their real AI toolkits, debate the future of consulting in an agent-powered world, and brainstorm how Claude Code and agent skills could transform their daily workflows.
January 9, 2026
Fabric Awards – Ep. 492
Mike and Tommy hand out their completely made-up Fabric Awards for 2025 — from 'Most Likely to Be Disabled by IT' to 'This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things.' Plus, Marco Russo confirms what they've been saying all along: notebooks win.
January 7, 2026
Our Fabric Resolutions – Ep. 491
Mike and Tommy share their 2026 Fabric resolutions — from doubling down on Power BI embedding and data warehouses to validating AI-generated code and building custom workloads. Plus, Microsoft acquires Osmos to bring agentic AI to Fabric data engineering.
January 2, 2026
Revisiting Dataflows Gen 2 – Ep. 490
Mike and Tommy revisit Dataflows Gen 2 after giving it a hard time for months — and the verdict? It's actually good now. New parallelization, modern query evaluation, and smarter pricing make it a real option again. Plus, the PBIR format admin setting and creative image visual tricks.
July 21, 2025
Max Performance in Power Query – Ep. 422
Alex Powers joins the Explicit Measures podcast to deep dive into optimizing Power Query for maximum performance, covering dataflows Gen 1 vs Gen 2, query folding, staging patterns, and the evolving role of Power Query in Microsoft Fabric.