Oct 20, 2026
Fabric deployment plans let you order deployments and run notebooks or pipelines before and after each item lands, which finally gives data a place in the release. Mike Carlo and Tommy Puglia work out which teams should reach for a plan, which should stay in Git and GitHub Actions, and why both would wait for GA.
Oct 15, 2026
The Fabric IQ ontology agent can draft an ontology from a lakehouse, and it still cannot finish the job it just offered to do. Tommy Puglia and Mike Carlo hold the preview out of any workspace a client depends on.
Oct 13, 2026
Microsoft's Fabric Notebook Toolkit lets an agent you already pay for drive notebooks from a CLI. Tommy Puglia and Mike Carlo treat the preview as a tool to learn, not a pattern to hand to every workspace.
Oct 8, 2026
Tommy Puglia borrows a four-bucket scale from Fatal Risk and asks where Fabric patterns land: preferred, accepted, discouraged, or unacceptable. Mike Carlo keeps the answer tied to the job, not the artifact.
Oct 6, 2026
An anonymous mailbag asks whether Power BI should let people act on a number without leaving the report. Tommy Puglia and Mike Carlo put writeback in Fabric apps, keep the report for consumption, and treat translytical task flows as the exception.
Oct 1, 2026
Tommy Puglia and Mike Carlo draft a team from the FabCon Barcelona feature list, starting with Fabric app backends and the ontology authoring agent. The picks that follow are pay-as-you-go capacity, the Fabric notebook toolkit, deployment hooks, and text search in semantic models.
Sep 29, 2026
Tommy Puglia and Mike Carlo use Kurt Buhler and Eugene Meidinger's Tabular Editor piece to decide which model and effort level belongs on a Fabric task. The same hour covers FabCon Barcelona's Fabric app backend, semantic views, and why monthly active agents may matter more than monthly active users.
Sep 24, 2026
Kurt Buhler tells Tommy Puglia and Mike Carlo that a full Power BI report from an agent went from a bad idea to a half-hour build in the span of a week. The catch, in his telling, is the report format, the context you bring, and a requirements process that now has to scale past a single page.
Sep 22, 2026
Tommy Puglia, Mike Carlo, and Kurt Buhler spend this episode on what is left of the Power BI identity once Microsoft Fabric and agents are part of the job. The skill that still decides the work is judgment: listening to the business, and staying critical of what an agent hands back.
Sep 17, 2026
Power Query is moving a set of cloud connectors from ODBC to ADBC, and legacy Power BI Q&A now stays through February 2027. Kurt Buhler joins Tommy Puglia and Mike Carlo to sort out what data literacy and AI literacy require once Microsoft Fabric and agents make it easy to build faster than a team can review.
Sep 15, 2026
Fabric Apps can own every pixel of a data experience, and Kurt Buhler is not ready to hand them the executive dashboard. Tommy Puglia and Mike Carlo spend the hour on where a Rayfin app fits beside Power BI, and on the design system, the token bill, and the research bench a team needs before it scales.
Sep 10, 2026
Tommy Puglia and Mike Carlo spend this episode on how a Microsoft Fabric project moves to a team that has to run it. Their model is I build, we build, then you build, and it holds when leadership, trust, and the team's own context stay in place after the builder steps back.
Sep 8, 2026
Tommy Puglia and Mike Carlo read Rituparna Das's Nightingale guide to using AI in data visualization without an enterprise license, and they ask what those three workflows become when the output is a Power BI report. They also take apart a Fabric warehouse medallion best-practices post and a private-link path for copying data to Snowflake.
Sep 3, 2026
Foundry can now find Fabric data agents in the OneLake catalog and attach more than one of them to a single agent. Tommy Puglia and Mike Carlo walk through what that changes, from the 15,000-character instruction limit to a CU bill that still deserves a hard look.
Sep 2, 2026
Business Ops, the Power BI Desktop external-tools manager, has moved from PowerBI.tips Products to GitHub for better distribution, simpler updates, and easier code management.
Sep 2, 2026
How do I download a Power BI layout as a PBIR file from the gallery?
Sep 1, 2026
On Explicit Measures, Tommy and Mike explain liquid clustering for Delta Lake tables in Microsoft Fabric and why Fabric Runtime 2.0 changes the cost of keeping that layout healthy. They walk Miles Cole's incremental optimize example and Mike's rules for when a Lakehouse Spark job is the right transform.
Aug 27, 2026
Tommy Puglia and Mike Carlo spend this episode on Microsoft's new guidance for choosing a medallion pattern in the Fabric Data Warehouse. Bronze, silver, and gold still describe the work; the open question is whether a warehouse belongs in every layer.
Aug 25, 2026
Eva Sibinga's Nightingale essay argues that large language models hallucinate by design and are sold to look helpful before they are right. Tommy Puglia and Mike Carlo take that diagnosis into Power BI and Microsoft Fabric: a harness of MCP servers, skills, and validated context, plus a prototype refined in stages, is how you keep the visual honest.
Aug 20, 2026
You will learn how the Power BI Desktop Bridge differs from its CLI, why a measure list produces a different page every time, and how to lock a spec before an agent builds anything. Mike Carlo and Tommy Puglia also cover the unsaved-state trap that lets a reload wipe edits still open in Desktop.
Aug 18, 2026
Anonymous data access lets a Rayfin app take a public write — a contact form, a game score, an outage report — and store it in a Fabric SQL database without an Entra account. Mike ranks that capability third: the case for Fabric apps is still that the data stays in Fabric, and that an agent can build and fix the app.
Aug 13, 2026
Mike has been building apps on Fabric as a backend since January, and he's coining it FAB. The case isn't that you already own Fabric — it's that the workspace identity, git integration, and SQL database remove the wiring you'd otherwise do by hand in Azure.
Aug 11, 2026
Meagan Longoria's five-stage maturity model for agentic Power BI development gives Mike and Tommy a framework to argue with. They mostly agree — except on the crawl stage, where Mike thinks starting with an MCP server beats starting with a chatbot.
Aug 6, 2026
Desktop Bridge gives agents a local server to drive Power BI Desktop — reload files, check report state, and take screenshots so the agent can verify its own work. Mike and Tommy agree on the prerequisite: don't use it without skills.