Microsoft Fabric Analytics Engineer Associate Study Guide

Chapter 8. Maintaining the Analytics Development Lifecycle

After a Power BI report is published to a workspace, it rarely stays the same. It gets updated, data models change, and new needs often come up. This is a good thing because it means users are working with the report, and we can improve it to provide better insights.

However, while making changes to a single report may seem easy, in large organizations, we often manage many reports or data models. We can’t just keep all the changes in our head. It’s important for the organization to track changes in a clear and organized way, so that even if we leave and come back again after a year, we understand what was done to the reports in our absence. Also, we sometimes need to move reports or datasets to other workspaces. For example, we may have separate workspaces for development, testing, and production. In addition, reusing parts of reports or models saves us time and effort because we don’t need to start from scratch every time.

In this chapter, we’ll explore how to handle all these tasks.

We begin with version control in a workspace, which helps us track changes and keep work organized. Next, we explore the Power BI project (.pbip) file format, which allows us to manage report files and related assets more efficiently. After that, we look at reusable assets such as template files (.pbit), data source files (.pbids), and shared semantic models. Then, we move on to deployment pipelines, which help promote content from development ...