Power BI has brought in a new feature that lets us understand the data set that we are working with, helping us identify if the dataset is a Certified Dataset or a Verified Dataset.

This feature will help organizations to understand which is the real and true data that needs to be used on reports. The best example will be the Financial data used by financial firms or the stock market data. Datasets can be in N number of copies but only one will host the true datapoints without alterations.

This is where Power BI helps report users based on categories of users to make use of the correct data to truly gain insights to report on them.

Power BI achieves this by showcasing the concept of Endorsements.

To use this new feature, we need to navigate to the settings of the dataset.

Shared Datasets

Datasets can be shared among different users based on their permission or access level granted on the workspace. We can manually add in the users from the Superuser who creates the workspace, who can then assign the respective users with their roles in the workspace.

The New Experience Workspace is now needed for these datasets to be shared.

When we are creating a new workspace, we will need to set the permissions for the users. We can allow them to connect to the app’s underlying datasets via build permissions.

Build Permissions of Datasets in Power BI

Power BI also provides the user with Data Governance features such as the ability to provide access to datasets or limiting the users from using the datasets.

An admin or member for the workspace where the dataset resides can decide during app publishing on whether the users with permission for the app also get the ‘Build permission’ for the underlying datasets.

Control the use of datasets across workspaces:

Admins can control the flow of datasets within the organization. The Power BI admin sometimes can restrict the flow of information to other Power BI tenants.

Lineage Tracking

Power BI has introduced another new feature on its datasets which is called as Lineage View. This view helps us in understanding which datasets and which reports are consuming what kind of endorsed or non-endorsed datasets.

Dataset owners in Power BI will be able to see the downstream use of their shared datasets by other users through the related content pane, allowing them to plan changes.

We can also see the initial source of data from which these datasets are being created.

Limitations

• Building a report on top of a dataset in a different workspace requires the new workspace experience at both ends: The report needs to be in a new workspace experience and the dataset needs to be in a new workspace experience.
• In a classic workspace, the dataset discovery experience only shows the datasets in that workspace.
• You can create reports in-app workspaces that are based on datasets in a different workspace. However, you can’t create an app for a workspace that contains those datasets.
• Free users in Desktop only see datasets from My Workspace and from Premium-based workspaces.
• If you want to add a report based on a shared dataset to an app, you must be a member of the dataset workspace. This is a known issue.
• “Publish to the web” doesn’t work for a report based on a shared dataset. This is by design.
• If two people are members of a workspace that is accessing a shared dataset, it’s possible that only one of them can see the related dataset in the workspace. Only people with at least Read access to the dataset can see the shared dataset.

Know more about Microsoft Power BI services offerings from Visual BI solutions here.