Microsoft Ignite is running at full speed and there are several truly amazing features and products that are making the BI/Analytics/Database world much more fun that it is currently 🙂 So, what are the things that took our attention? Here’s the short list:

SQL Server 2019 is now GA – so all the new performance, monitoring and management improvements, big data clusters, calculation groups in analysis services, SSRS improvements, SA benefits changes, edition changes, and so on, are now available for you to evaluate and possibly upgrade. A quick-learning video series is also available to get through all new features of SQL Server 2019.
Azure Synapse Analytics – the successor of Azure Datawarehouse, this service gets us really, really excited! It’s promising petabyte scale, performance, PowerBI integration, ability to combine batch and streaming scenarios, irrelevant of size and schema. This is cool! So, here’s the announcement! Personally I intend to invest some time in getting up to speed with this service, so follow our webinars for more details 🙂
PowerBI world – so many things are happening there!! First – enterprise information management capabilities – data lineage and the ability to secure and audit the data, including prevention of export of sensitive data, classification of reports and overall security/audit integration! Second – Large Models for PowerBI Premium – well, yes, it’s in Premium and it allows you to run models up to 400 GBs (40 times more than the current 10 gigs). Third – oh, boy, those features!!! Those you’ll have to see for yourself, I can’t explain them 🙂

So, this was just the start of Ignite. I believe there is still more to come, so stay tuned!