When Power BI was released, I was working with customers to try and adopt DevOps for their database code. At that time, I thought the Microsoft developers had made an extremely poor decision with the PBIX format in that it wasn’t well suited for version control. In 2011, when it was first released, we not only had decades of knowledge about version control and the power of DevOps, but we’d also been living with the extremely poor format of code in Integration Services packages (among other data tools), that were poorly suited for understanding in version control systems.

Power BI has grown, and with the Fabric announcements, there are integrations with git for your workspace. There is also a Power BI Developer mode that saves your project in a folder structure rather than one file, which is better. I’m not sure it’s great, especially if it doesn’t enforce text in a way that ensures a developer can easily see changes between settings and understand them. I can certainly diff the XML in two SSIS packages, but that doesn’t mean that it’s easy to understand what has changed.

I think all modern tools used to build software, including the various reporting systems, need to be built with a pipeline and team development in mind, and set up to ensure that multiple developers can review code in some sort of Git-pull-request format. For those tools that use GUI formatting, I’d hope they separate out GUI elements from others, as no one needs to pull request a change that moves a visual box on screen left 2 pixels. However, if you change the OnError response or formula inside the box, that should be easy to see in code.

This isn’t a simple concept to design for, especially for software that is based on a novel idea and is often built by a small team. However, periodic review of how the software stores changes and how a less experienced developer might review those changes is important to ensuring that our tools scale to the modern needs of distributed team development where our collaboration is often through protocols like pull requests.

Steve Jones

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