Mathias Thierbach
Data Platform MVP, Power BI Contributor, Developer of pbi-tools
London, United Kingdom
In 2015, after having spent over ten years as a Software Developer and Architect with Microsoft technologies, Mathias Thierbach moved into the Microsoft BI space. He soon landed on Power BI, but also realized quickly that the development and engineering tools and practices were nothing like the ones well established in software development. This is how pbi-tools started as a project, the only complete source control solution for Power BI.
During seven years of leading a data management team at YouGov, he experienced the benefits of those efforts every day. Having open sourced the project in fall of 2021, Mathias spends a lot of his free time bringing source control and DevOps practices to the wider Power BI community now.
In addition to his open source engagements, Mathias cares deeply about his role as an enterprise technology leader. Like many, once having started as a single contributor technologist, he had to pivot significantly when he moved into a manager role, responsible for building, stabilizing and growing a team of data engineers, analysts and architects. Mathias is now passionately sharing the many experiences and learnings that came out of that journey with the community.
Awards
Area of Expertise
Topics
Professional Developer Experiences in Power BI
Developer Mode seamlessly integrates developer-centric features directly into Microsoft Power BI Desktop. This advancement empowers users to effortlessly implement source control for their work, thereby boosting efficiency and enhancing the maintenance of Power BI projects.
When combined with Azure DevOps and Fabric Git Integration, Developer Mode opens up unprecedented collaboration possibilities, facilitating the establishment of robust Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipelines. These pipelines not only improve the reliability of Power BI projects but also enable scalability, ultimately elevating the development and collaboration experience to new heights.
Join me to explore how these powerful tools can transform your Power BI development experience. Learn about Power BI Desktop Developer Mode, Fabric Git Integration, Fabric APIs, and what's possible with external tools.
Power BI Report Development in a Team with Developer Mode
Power BI projects often start very small, with a single person quickly creating impressive results using Power BI Desktop and a project that is fully contained in a single file. When those early successes are then expected to scale in an enterprise context and to be replicated by a larger team, things get more complicated.
Model developers have had advanced tooling available for a while, for instance the XMLA endpoint, Tabular Editor, and TMDL. However, for report developers only the new Power BI Developer Mode (released in public preview in 2023) has delivered the foundations for better tooling and workflows.
This session demonstrates what Developer Mode (as well as other external tools) means for practical report development in a professional environment. You'll learn from Mathias, who pioneered similar workflows with his open-source pbi-tools, and hence has many years of experience developing and maintaining Power BI reports in a collaborative manner.
Mastering Git Flows in Fabric Data Projects: Strategies for Success
In the realm of Fabric data projects, where the intricacy of data intertwines with the need for high-quality code management, adopting a tailored Git development workflow becomes essential. This session unveils the strategies for leveraging Git to manage the lifecycle of fabric data projects, ensuring that the team collaboration is seamless, and development processes are more efficient and error-resistant.
The session will dissect various Git workflows, such as Feature Branch Workflow, Gitflow Workflow, Forking Workflow, and the Trunk Based Development approach. By comparing these models, participants will learn how to choose and customize the most fitting workflow for their fabric data projects, considering factors such as team size, project scope, and deployment practices.
Furthermore, real-world scenarios will be presented to illustrate how adopting Git workflows can minimize conflicts, improve code quality, and accelerate development timelines in fabric data projects. Best practices for branch management, pull requests, code reviews, and continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines will be discussed, offering participants actionable strategies for enhancing their current practices.
To bridge the gap between theory and application, the session will include a hands-on segment where participants will simulate a mini fabric data project using a selected Git workflow. This exercise aims to solidify understanding, making it easier for attendees to implement these workflows in their own projects.
Concluding, the session will address advanced tips for scaling Git workflows as fabric data projects grow and evolve, ensuring that development practices remain robust, adaptable, and conducive to high-quality data processing and analysis outcomes.
Whether you're a software developer, data scientist, project manager, or anyone involved in fabric data projects looking to enhance your team's development practices and collaboration, this session will equip you with the knowledge and skills to implement efficient and effective Git workflows tailored to your project's needs.
Introduction to Microsoft Fabric CI / CD
Microsoft Fabric is the new kid in town for the full Data & Analytics stack in Azure, all in one Software as a Service offering. Combining workloads for Data Integration, Data Engineering, Data Science, Analytics and Reporting is meant to streamline and simplify managing the implementation and maintenance of your Data & Analytics projects.
This cannot be achieved without proper support for Dev and Data Ops, including integral aspects like CI / CD pipelines.
We'll use this 50-minute session to give you an introduction into which features Microsoft Fabric offers natively to fulfil this goal. By evaluating against best practices, we will show advantages and disadvantages and explain implementation patterns.
Automated Testing Solutions for Power BI
Automated Testing is an integral part of modern DevOps solutions. Tests run frequently and automated as part of integration pipelines give ultimate confidence to anyone responsible for enterprise software solutions.
What does this mean for Power BI and analytics projects? What options are available and how do teams get started? Testing, and automated testing in particular, is the most underdeveloped area in the Enterprise Power BI space, both in terms of processes as well as tooling.
Mathias, who has developed and promoted strong Enterprise DataOps practices for Power BI via pbi-tools, in this session provides a comprehensive overview of what is currently possible.
Considering Power BI datasets as well as reports, you will get a thorough understanding of the practical benefits of automating testing. You will learn about various external tools and community approaches, including the latest pbi-tools features. And you will see some end-to-end examples to guide you through your own Power BI DataOps implementation.
Git Development Flows and Best Practices for Fabric data projects
In the realm of Fabric data projects, where the intricacy of data intertwines with the need for high-quality code management, adopting a tailored Git development workflow becomes essential. This session unveils the strategies for leveraging Git to manage the lifecycle of Fabric data projects, ensuring that the team collaboration is seamless, and development processes are more efficient and error-resistant.
As we delve deeper, the session will dissect various Git workflows, such as Feature Branch Workflow, Gitflow Workflow, Forking Workflow, and the Trunk Based Development approach. By comparing these models, participants will learn how to choose and customize the most fitting workflow for their fabric data projects, considering factors such as team size, project scope, and deployment practices.
Best practices for branch management, pull requests, code reviews, and continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines will be discussed, offering participants actionable strategies for enhancing their current practices.
Concluding, the session will address advanced tips for scaling Git workflows as fabric data projects grow and evolve, ensuring that development practices remain robust, adaptable, and conducive to high-quality data processing and analysis outcomes.
Whether you're a software developer, data scientist, project manager, or anyone involved in Fabric data projects looking to enhance your team's development practices and collaboration, this session will equip you with the knowledge and skills to implement efficient and effective Git workflows tailored to your project's needs.
Microsoft Fabric CI/CD - What is there and what is coming?
Microsoft Fabric is the new kid in town for the full Data & Analytics stack in Azure, all in one Software as a Service offering. Combining workloads for Data Integration, Data Engineering, Data Science, Analytics and Reporting is meant to streamline and simplify managing the implementation and maintenance of your Data & Analytics projects.
But to achieve this goal, support for Dev and Data Ops is absolutely necessary. This was one of the gaps often addressed also for existing offerings like Power BI and Synapse, where support was either not there at all or insufficient.
This demo-rich session will deliver an overview of the features Microsoft Fabric offers to support a clean and efficient CI/CD process. Which workloads and items are supported, how can best practices be achieved and which gaps can still be perceived.
We'd love to experience an interactive session by not only sharing our point of view, but by discussing advantages and disadvantages with you and learning about your feedback and perception.
Deep Dive into Power BI Source Control
2023 has brought significant new capabilities to Power BI for source control and deployment automation - Developer Mode, TMDL, and Fabric Git Integration, to name a few. Features many Pro users have been demanding for years.
With further extensions to those technologies planned for early 2024, this session is your opportunity to learn about the current state of source control for Power BI in a deep-dive workshop.
The session will focus on professional development patterns in a collaborative environment. It will explain and show how all the latest Pro Dev features in Power BI can be utilized to set up practical team development workflows.
Furthermore, attendees will understand where Microsoft's tooling still has gaps, and how external tools can be brought in to help.
Power BI Source Control & CI/CD
Professional CI/CD for Power BI is finally available to a wide audience with recent product innovations like Power BI Desktop Developer Mode and Fabric Git Integration! However, there are still many techniques and best practices to learn and understand. This training day enables you to get there!
With many new tools and features available only since 2023, this session is your opportunity to learn, hands-on, how to get started with source control, which tools are available, and what it takes to implement them successfully for your team/project.
You will learn about source control basics and practice the use of Git, Visual Studio Code and Azure DevOps in conjunction with Power BI. All the latest Power BI source control and collaboration features are covered, including Power BI Deployment Pipelines as well as advanced CI/CD pipelines via external tools.
Join this day for an in-depth and hands-on course that takes you from zero to be able to apply your new skills and implement better practices in your team.
Agenda:
1. Hands-on source control tutorial
2. Setting up CI/CD in your organization
3. Advanced workflows and branching strategies
Objectives:
* Learn git and source control basics
* Become familiar with Azure DevOps
* Understand DataOps principles
* Get a practical overview of the current CI/CD landscape for Power BI, both around tools and patterns
Tracking changes in Power BI Reports
With Fabric workspace git integration and Power BI Desktop Developer Mode, Microsoft has finally made substantial investments into source control capabilities for Power BI content creators.
The sources describing Power BI data models have long been known across the industry and are well documented (BIM, TMDL), but what about the report?
With the public preview of Developer Mode in PBI Desktop, released in June 2023, the sources behind reports (pages and visuals) have been made visible everyone for the first time. However, documentation and general understanding of those artifacts is still very sparse.
This session gives you all the information you need to take advantage of this change for your own development workflows:
* Learn to "read" the report sources in their current shape
* Understand upcoming improvements to the format
* Get an introduction to existing tooling, including some new, recently released, external tools
* Use your new understanding of the report sources for quality checks and sign-offs
Mathias has many years of experience implementing source control solutions for Power BI reports via his open source tool, pbi-tools. He also contributed the declarative TMDL format for datasets to the product team - explicitly designed to support source control scenarios.
What's New for Power BI CI/CD
As Power BI is being adopted by more and more businesses, there is a growing number of technical data management teams finding themselves with a desire to implement DevOps/DataOps principles and practices as part of their delivery process. CI/CD pipelines are an integral part of those systems, and for a long time Power BI was lacking suitable CI/CD capabilities. This situation has changed significantly in 2023, and several viable solutions are now available, both from Microsoft as well as from external tools.
This session provides an annotated overview of the latest Power BI CI/CD landscape. Looking at datasets, reports and other workspace artifacts, attendees will learn which options are available and what it takes to implement them. Advantages and disadvantages are explained as well as licensing requirements.
Mathias is uniquely qualified to present this topic: His open-source tool, pbi-tools, pioneered source control and CI/CD capabilities for Power BI. Earlier in 2023, Mathias contributed the new TMDL declarative data modeling language to Power BI, specifically to enhance the ability manage Power BI projects with DevOps tooling and enable enterprise-level collaboration scenarios. For anyone getting started with CI/CD for their Power BI projects as well as existing practitioners interested in updating their technical understanding of today's capabilities, this session is a must.
Incremental Refresh and partition management
You have lots of data, well Power BI can handle it. Build efficient loading data models by using Incremental Refresh in Power BI.
While setting up incremental refresh is easy, what is happening in Power BI.com is more of a mystery. This session does a deep dive into what happens when you are incrementally refreshing datasets.
This will be a technical dive in to Power BI Incremental refresh using SSMS, SQL Profiler, and Tabular Editor 3
Attendees will walk away with a complete understanding of the Incremental refresh set up within Power BI. Then a technical understanding of what happens at the Analysis services side inside PowerBI.com.
Extra topics also covered:
- Hybrid refresh policies
- Advanced features enabled via the Tabular Object Model
- Impact for deployment of datasets (DevOps concerns)
What is GIT and how do I get started? An introduction for Power BI developers
The session will explain GIT concepts to people who are new to source control or who want to refresh their knowledge. Power BI developers without an engineering background have traditionally felt a little lost in the world of GitHub and Azure Repos. However, tools like Tabular Editor and pbi-tools have brought source control capabilities into the Power BI ecosystem. There are even hints that Microsoft might be taking source control for Power BI more seriously now! Time for everyone to learn the basics, understand the key concepts and know which tools to use and where to find help!
If you want to understand what source control is and what terms like git, commit, branch, and pull request mean, this is the session for you. In addition to explaining the basics the session will also demonstrate some end-to-end development workflows using git for Power BI projects.
Advanced git Branching Model for Power BI
This session introduces in theory and practice a git branching model supporting collaborative incremental releases for Power BI datasets and reports.
The model is collaborative: it is designed for multiple team members working jointly on a shared set of changes.
It is designed for incremental releases: Those continuously deliver business value with a regular and reliable release cadence and allow the product manager, the develop team as well as stakeholders to refer to a particular feature set using a shared versioning scheme.
Using both the source control as well as deployment capabilities of pbi-tools (https://pbi.tools), this model was developed by Mathias as part of building and growing a distributed data management team and was continuously improved over multiple iterations.
Join the session to learn how it works, the thinking behind, and how to adopt it for your own workflows. Foundational understanding of source control and CI/CD is recommended.
Power BI Model Development Best Practices in a Team
Power BI projects often start very small, with a single person quickly creating impressive results using Power BI Desktop and a project that is fully contained in a single file. When those early successes are then expected to scale in an enterprise context and to be replicated by a larger team, things get more complicated. There is no obvious scale-out path, particularly with regard to model development.
Mathias, who has been on this exact journey over the past six years, presents the practices he has developed during that time, going from a single contributor beginning to a highly effective team setup. The session covers processes, tools, roles and automation, with a focus on very practical take-aways.
The session presents and explains the components required to establish a highly effective team developing Power BI models: Processes, Tools, Deployment Automation, and Documentation. Attendees will be able to take away plenty of proven ideas and patterns, including a source control based development model, a change management system using release pipelines, and a CI/CD setup providing automation at all possible stages. The key focus will be on the right processes to implement within the team.
In addition to Power BI Desktop, tools covered in the session include Tabular Editor, DAX Studio, and pbi-tools.
Lessons learned building a Power BI Team
You have spent most of your career with a focus on technology and you're feeling at home in that domain. Now you have been asked to build a team underneath you to take your previous accomplishments to the next level. Or you are considering a career move and step into management. If that is you and you are a technologist who is now a new or aspiring manager, this session will give you plenty of practical advise what to expect and prepare for.
From his own experience of having gone down this path over more than five years, Mathias will present his learnings and insights. It turns out the field of managing people and ensuring a team can function well as a coherent unit is rather different from the field of technology and computers! This session will help you not to feel lost and overwhelmed and instead take on this new challenge with great confidence and joy. The main focus is on "soft skills", however, embedded in a professional Power BI context.
Most importantly, you will be able to learn from someone else's mistakes instead of repeating them all yourself! Or, you might instead decide that a move into management is not for you after all and you should rather stay in a single contributor role. Either way, you will walk away with lots of trips & tricks. You will learn techniques for having greater awareness of yourself and others. You will get a useful reading list. And you will get plenty of food for thought and reflection. Ideally, this will make some contribution to making you a better leader and manager!
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