Hello, friends! Today, I'm diving deep into my own adventure with Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Deployment (CD) in the realm of Power BI—a journey marked by trials, triumphs, and a lot of learning along the way. For so long, CI/CD in Power BI felt like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. With a mix of third-party tools and makeshift solutions, my team and I navigated through a maze of compliance and administrative hurdles, often feeling lost in a sea of approvals and support tickets to try introduce a potential CI/CD solution or workaround. Then came May 2023, and with it, a beacon of hope: Power BI project files. This was more than just a feature; it was a revolution that promised to redefine how we approached our projects.

The Before Times: Rewind to before this pivotal change. My team, like many others working in data analytics within complex, multinational landscapes, struggled immensely with the lack of source control in Power BI. Our attempts at version control felt archaic—think "save as" with date and version stamps—and far from agile (shared folders on SharePoints or OneDrive). We were a team longing for simplicity and efficiency but found ourselves bogged down by the limitations of our tools.

A Game Changer: Power BI Project Files: Then, the game changed. The introduction of project files (.PBIP) wasn't just an update; it was a lifeline. This wasn't about saving our projects as mere files; it was about evolving them into living, breathing entities, organized within folders that spoke the language of our data stories through JSON (not ideal, but still an enormous improvement) .

Getting Our Hands Dirty: Embracing this new world, we ventured into the depths of Git with VS Code and Azure DevOps.

Each Power BI file became its own project, its own repository. This structure, while logical, required us to rewire our brains, to rethink our approach to collaboration and version control. Our workflow transformed, becoming more streamlined yet demanding a new level of diligence and precision.

The Rocky Road: It wasn't all smooth sailing. Adopting Power BI project files and integrating Git introduced us to a host of challenges. Merge conflicts became our nemesis, and the occasional quirks of a preview feature tested our patience. But with every stumble, our resolve grew stronger. The benefits—oh, the benefits!—far outweighed the occasional headaches. We were building something resilient, transparent, and infinitely more manageable.

Looking Ahead with TMDL: The next big step ahead is the introduction of TMDL. Storing your semantic model in TMDL (preview feature since the March 2024 update) transforms the code into a format that's not only human-readable but also intuitively organized, making every element—be it measures, tables, or columns—distinctly easy to identify in separate blocks. This clarity significantly simplifies the process of resolving merge conflicts and tracking changes, making the whole experience more straightforward.

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Why This Matters: The move to source control in Power BI has been nothing short of transformative. It brought clarity to our development process, made our end products more reliable, and, most importantly, it strengthened our team's bond. We learned to communicate more effectively, to trust in our collective skills, and to embrace the inevitable learning curve together.

To be continued...