- Yooo! Adam Saxton with Guy
in a Cube, and in this video, let's talk about source control or version control and what
that means for Power BI "cause I know you wanna know. Let's do this. (upbeat music) If you're finding us for the first time, be sure to hit that
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from both Patrick and myself. Alright, Source control,
version control, Power BI. What does this all mean? We get this question a lot. So anytime we're doing a live stream or we're doing some sort
of Q&A for some user group or conference or whatever, this question comes up at least one time. Sometimes more than once. Really what people are asking for is, they want a separation
of the report, the data model and the power query elements. And be able to save those from a versioning
perspective to do rollbacks or divs between the files
to see what changed. And then be able to deploy
those in a consistent manner, so continuous integration or continuous deployment
also referred to as CI/CD. So if you hear that term,
that's what that means. So this is just like
a deployment operation for your source files. That would be the
magical state of Power BI but it's not quite there yet. And hopefully it will be someday. So let me show you what's available today. And then let's talk about
some things that are coming down the pipeline that we
can explore a little bit. Right, enough of all this talking. You know how we like to do
it here in Guy in a Cube, is to what? Head over to my machine. I've got my lovely report right here. What I wanna do is have some sort of version control or source control. The thing to understand here is that the Power BI desktop
file itself, the PBIX file, is just a binary file, right. So we can't do divs on this file. It includes everything. It includes the reports. It includes the model definition. It includes all those
power query elements. And we can't separate that from a source control perspective. So all we can do is stick this binary file into some sort of source control system. What I've seen a lot of people
do, and this works well. They'll stick it into
like a OneDrive folder or a SharePoint document library. And so this is a OneDrive
folder that's connected to the Cloud. And when I do this, I can right click and I can say, hey, show
me the version history. And this will show the
OneDrive version history as part of it, so you can see that I've got multiple items
here that are available and I can click on that. I can say, hey, restore this version or download it independently. And this tracks changes. This is probably the easiest thing that a business user can do
'cause it's readily available. Most folks have either
OneDrive or SharePoint from an office integration perspective. If they're using office 365,
I'm sure that there's some sort of functionality with Google Drive as well or Dropbox or things of that nature. So you could explore those
if that's what you're using but this is a great option
for just anyone, right? So if we wanna take this up a level and what we can do there
is GitHub or Azure DevOps or something of that nature
where we can actually have items that are in here. Let me go ahead and refresh this. And we can see that in
a different branch here, go to my version demo here. And I've got a models folder, right? And I've got items that are here so I can have PBIX files that
are stored inside of GitHub. And then those can be tracked from a version history as well. And you can go based on
your commits and things of that nature, you can track
the versions of those items. But again, this is just
the binary file, right? I can't do divs. I can't extract different components of it or see what changed. So you're just stuck to the binary file. What we can do is, the model side of this. So the model piece, we have some options here that
take this a little further especially if you're
using Power BI premium. Let me show you what I mean. So if I'm inside of my report, I've got a tool called Tabular
Editor that's installed and so I can just go to external tools. I can go to Tabular Editor. And when I'm inside of that,
I could do file save as and I can save the BIM file. So this is the BI model, right? This is the model definition of my report. And when I look at that,
right, I can just right click and open it with code or notepad here. Let me just open it with
our friendly tool notepad. It's just a JSON file, right? So this is the model definition. This is a text file. I can work with text files. I can do divs on text files. I can do any extraction of that text file. Text files work really
good with source control. And so from a model definition perspective if we can get that BIM file you can actually do tracking
and changes on that. There is some process you need
to put around that in terms of check-ins and making
sure people are actually following the steps to do it. There's no direct integration with Power BI desktop to do this. So you have to go a little extra steps to go through that process. And that can be a little bit of a struggle especially if you're
working with a business team that doesn't understand how all of this works. One advantage of this is,
I'm using GitHub in this case and I can go through and as
I make changes on these items I can see that, hey,
something's been modified here. When those modifications
happen, you may be like, I wonder what changed. So let me do this, open it up in Visual Studio Code. When I've got the file
inside of Visual Studio Code. If I go to my GitHub
integration and I right click and then I'm gonna say,
what changed in this file? And so I can see these are the changes. This is what's actually being committed to my GitHub repo at this point. In the original file I can see
that we had is hidden, true, but in the version that has the changes, I can see that, that's been removed. Another one that was originally hidden but now it's removed and we
can go through and see, okay what were those changes? Do I wanna actually commit those? So again, doing that div operation to understand what's been changing. And this is what I think everyone wants in terms of the report
definition, the model the power query, all of those things. Just being able to explore
what actually changed. So we can technically do it
from a model perspective. One word of caution on this,
is when you start doing this you can't necessarily
deploy these changes back into Power BI desktop. So that's not technically supported. What you can do is if you're
using Power BI premium you've got the xmla endpoint. You can start using tools like ALM toolkit and be able to deploy that
to the xmla end point. So if you're going through
an actual development process of your data model, this
can be effective and be done for the modeling piece
specifically, that's the only part of Power BI that really
you can do that with today. Let's look at what's coming
down the pipeline to do that. We have to talk about
deployment pipelines. There's already been
announcements that Azure DevOps and GitHub integration is
coming for deployment pipelines. What that means is that
you'll be able to tie in your CI/CD or your continuous
deployment operations, with Azure DevOps and
GitHub and push those into the deployment pipelines
from a Power BI perspective. So if you have some sort of change operation,
hey, there's file's there I wanna update the file. And then I wanna actually push that from dev to test to prod
and or update the app. Those are the things that
are gonna be available in that update. What this is not gonna
give you is that separation of those items, give you
that full div capabilities and things of that nature. So, those are items that I know a lot of people have been asking for. I'm hoping that at some point in the future we will get that type of separation and level of
detail that we can work with that but today it's just not available. And I've also got a link to an idea item from ideas.powerbi.com in
the description below too it's got almost a thousand votes. You can vote that up as well if that's something that
you're interested in. I think there's some other ideas that are out there as well that
you can vote up as well, just to lend your voice to
the product and just say, this is what we want. Hopefully this helps you
wrap your head around what's available from a version control or source control perspective. I'd love to know your thoughts. Let me know in the comments below. How have you've been working with this? Do you have like techniques
that you're using to actually accomplish these
operations in your environment? I'd love to know. If you liked this video be sure to hit that big thumbs up button,
smash it if you so desire. If it's your first time here,
hit that subscribe button. And as always from both Patrick and myself thank you so much for
watching, keep being awesome. And we'll see you in the next video.
