Self-service data prep for big data  

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  • Self-service data prep for big data – We’re expanding self-service data prep in Power BI with new capabilities to help business analysts extract insights from big data. Using the Power Query experience already familiar to millions of Power BI Desktop and Excel users, business analysts can ingest, transform, integrate, and enrich big data with Power BI – including data from a large and growing set of supported on-premises and cloud-based data sources, such as Dynamics 365, Salesforce, Azure SQL Data Warehouse, Excel, and SharePoint. Users can directly map data to known entities, modify and extend existing entities, or create custom entities all within Power BI.

  • Common Data Model support – We’ve expanded the familiar Power BI workspace experience to include new tools to easily map your business data to the Common Data Model (Microsoft’s standardized schema), enrich it with Microsoft and third-party data, and gain simplified access to machine learning. These new capabilities can be leveraged to provide intelligent and actionable insights into your business data. 

  • Advanced analytics and AI with Azure – We’re fueling collaboration across roles by unifying access to data between Power BI and Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2. Business analysts can seamlessly operate on data stored in Azure Data Lake Storage with the self-service capabilities in Power BI, while data engineers, data scientists, and other users can extend access to insights with advanced analytics and AI from complementary Azure Data Services like Azure Data Factory, Azure Databricks, and Azure Machine Learning. For example, data engineers can add, enrich, and orchestrate data; data scientists can build machine learning models; and business analysts can benefit from the work of others and the data available in Azure Data Lake Storage while continuing to use the self-service tools in Power BI to build and share insights broadly.