Microsoft Power BI Now Integrated With Azure Data Lake Storage

Microsoft Power BI users can now collaborate directly with Azure users using data stored in Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 through new integration capabilities recently unveiled by Microsoft. The new capabilities were announced by Ben Sack, program manager for Power BI, in a recent post on the PowerBI Blog. "With this integration, business analysts and BI professionals working in Power BI can easily collaborate with data analysts, engineers, and scientists working in Azure," wrote Sack. "These new features free valuable time and resources previously spent extracting and unifying data from different sources, so your team can focus on turning data into insights." So far, the integration involves the Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 preview version. The move is aimed at helping business organizations unify their data across Power BI and Azure data services. The latest integration follows Power BI self-service data preparation capabilities with dataflows  that were announced in November, according to Sack. Those dataflow capabilities made it possible for business analysts and BI professionals to author and manage complex data prep tasks using familiar self-service tools, he wrote.