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Jan 9, 2026
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.
Jan 7, 2026
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.
Jan 2, 2026
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.
Dec 31, 2025
Mike and Tommy unpack Fabric IQ's new ontology feature and why it will create friction in organizations—from cultural resistance to political turf wars over data definitions. They explore MCP vs. IDE workflows and debate whether businesses are mature enough for enterprise-wide semantic alignment.
Dec 26, 2025
Mike and Tommy exchange Power BI and Fabric feature wishlists in a holiday Secret Santa format, proposing everything from sticky notebook cells to integrated Python notebooks in desktop. A fun Christmas special packed with product ideas that could reshape the developer experience.
Dec 24, 2025
Mike and Tommy explore the emerging 'Intelligence Developer' role—a new position shaped by AI and Fabric IQ that shifts focus from metrics to dimensions and data governance. They also recap the biggest SQL, Fabric, and Power BI developments of 2025.
Dec 19, 2025
Mike and Tommy ask the big question: who in your organization is going to build the Fabric IQ ontology? They explore a 'backwards' approach—starting from semantic models you already have—and debate whether the BI team, data governance, or a new role should own it.
Dec 17, 2025
Mike and Tommy explore the new 1-click notebook experience for Power BI semantic models, including Semantic Link integration and what it means for BI developers moving into Python and Spark workflows. Plus, how Fabric's forecasting service makes Spark notebooks feel instant.
Dec 12, 2025
Mike and Tommy explore what data governance looks like in the Fabric IQ era, unpacking how ontology changes the governance conversation from policing data to defining business meaning. Plus, notebooks in pipelines now support service principals and workspace identity.
Dec 10, 2025
Mike and Tommy break down what it means to model semantic models directly in the Power BI service—why it’s a big deal for Mac users, collaboration, and faster iteration. They also highlight version history as a safety net for live edits and discuss how the web experience changes the modeling workflow.
Dec 5, 2025
Mike and Tommy recap Microsoft Ignite and the November 2025 updates across Fabric, OneLake, and Power BI—highlighting Fabric IQ, data integration improvements, and platform tooling. They also share practical ways they’re using AI for productivity, from meeting facilitation to developer workflows with Claude Code.
Dec 3, 2025
Mike and Tommy reflect on rebuilding data environments using lessons learned—why semantic models and shared definitions matter more than ever as teams scale. They connect the dots between metric stores, governance, and the push toward a unified semantic layer in Fabric and Power BI.
Nov 28, 2025
Mike and Tommy react to the argument that centralized data teams become bottlenecks—and explore why embedding data ownership inside product teams can deliver faster, more relevant outcomes. They discuss the tradeoffs: governance, consistency, and how to avoid replacing one silo with many.
Nov 26, 2025
A consultant managing 120+ Power BI dashboards across 70 school districts asks: what's the best way to track app-level usage at scale? Mike and Tommy break down the monitoring landscape—from built-in usage metrics to admin APIs and Fabric capacity metrics.
Nov 21, 2025
Mike and Tommy tackle one of Fabric's most confusing topics: how to design and manage workspaces when you're juggling branching, deployment pipelines, and a growing number of artifacts. They share patterns that work and anti-patterns that create chaos.
Nov 19, 2025
Another mailbag episode where Mike and Tommy emphasize the most important question in any data project: what problem are you actually trying to solve? Before picking tools, building pipelines, or designing models—start with the why.
Nov 14, 2025
Mike and Tommy explore the concept of a 'semantic bridge'—connecting semantic layers across platforms like Power BI, Databricks, Snowflake, and dbt. They compare approaches to semantic modeling across the industry and discuss what it means for cross-platform analytics.
Nov 12, 2025
Mike and Tommy tackle the messy reality of source control in BI—branching, merging, TMDL, save-to-folder, and whether BI teams are ready for real git workflows. Plus, the Microsoft SQL Community Conference gets announced.
Nov 7, 2025
Mike and Tommy explore the evolving role of AI in semantic modeling—from Anthropic's MCP code execution to TMDL-aware AI workflows. They also discuss 'context rot' and what happens when AI assistants lose track of long conversations. Plus, new Data Agent improvements and the upcoming card visual migration.
Nov 6, 2025
Mike Carlo and Pragati walk through everything you need to know to level up from PL-300 to DP-600 — from lakehouses and pipelines to semantic model optimization and security in Microsoft Fabric.
Nov 5, 2025
Mike and Tommy explore developer experience (DevEx) in the BI world—what makes tools stick, why UDFs (User Defined Functions) in DAX are a game-changer, and how Tabular Editor's TMDL scripts and notebooks fit into modern BI development workflows.
Oct 31, 2025
Mike and Tommy break down Fabric's Real Time Intelligence for Power BI professionals—what it is, when you need it, and how to get started with KQL and event-driven data without leaving the Fabric ecosystem.
Oct 29, 2025
Mike and Tommy explore how data modeling changes when your source data comes from event-driven systems rather than traditional transactional databases. They discuss the shift from state-based to event-based thinking and what it means for semantic models.
Oct 24, 2025
Mike and Tommy dive into the quirky world of DAX measure totals—why they don't always behave as expected and what Daniel Otykier's research reveals about the underlying mechanics. Plus, dbt Labs gets acquired by Fivetran and Dataflows Gen2 gets a performance revolution.