Analytics Engineering with Microsoft Fabric and Power BI

Chapter 15. Manage the Analytics Development Lifecycle

A Note for Early Release Readers

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This will be the 15th chapter of the final book. Please note that the GitHub repo will be made active later on.

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Before we start introducing specific Fabric features for handling the analytics development lifecycle, let’s be honest: analytics teams have a terrible track record of not treating their work like real software. For decades, change management in the business intelligence world meant someone emailing a PBIX file around, or worse, opening the production workspace and “just fixing it quickly.” No branches, no pull requests, no reviewers. And when something broke at 3 a.m., nobody could tell you what changed, or when, or why.

That world is gone, or at least it should be. Microsoft Fabric ships with a real application lifecycle management (ALM) story built into the platform. Git integration, deployment pipelines, variable libraries, a fully-fledged CLI, open source Python libraries, REST APIs for every corner of the surface area. The tooling is there. The question is whether you actually use it, and whether you know how to fit the pieces together ...