Episode 435: Power BI Meets Git and MCP

About this episode

Welcome to Episode 435 of the Microsoft Cloud IT Pro Podcast. In this episode, Ben and Scott take a lap around what’s new in Power BI, starting with the two MCP servers now in preview, one local and one remote, that can clean up your data model, write DAX for you, and turn a messy pile of tables into an actual usable semantic model. Ben shares how it helped him tame a 44 table QuickBooks Online mess, and why he had way better luck with it than with Copilot in Power BI. From there they get into PBIP, the newer Power BI project file format that breaks a report into files you can actually put in Git and collaborate on like real developers, branches, rollbacks, and all. It has been in preview since 2023 and still lacks solid guidance from Microsoft on wiring up CI/CD, but Ben and Scott dig into why it is worth adopting anyway, even if you are working solo. Show Notes • Overview of the Power BI MCP servers (Preview) • Power BI Desktop projects Git integration • Power BI Modeling MCP Server • Episode 90 – Power BI and Data Democratization with Alexander Arvidsson • Episode 287 – Power BI Field Parameters and Microsoft Entra • Optimize your semantic model fo