PowerBI Source Control using Deployment pipeline

[julsr]

Hi Everyone,

We've implemented Deployment Pipelines in our PowerBI Service; this process is the one we have right now:

I'm wondering if it's possible to add a Source Control version in PowerBI. Is there a similar process to Github, where you can commit and push your changes (just like publishing in PowerBI desktop), and then easily track the modifications made or revert back to a previous version?

Do you think it would work to use the method described in https://community.fabric.microsoft.com/t5/Service/Power-BI-Source-Control-Github/m-p/1081113, incorporate https://github.com/pbi-tools/pbi-tools, and then transfer it through various stages using GitHub's Deployment Pipeline Process within the PowerBI service and the GitHub Code within Github?

Regards,

Julian

[julsr · Accepted solution]

Thanks @AlexisOlson! I researched PBI Tools, and it looks cool, but in the end, I found PowerBI deployment Pipelines meet my requirement to have Source Control within PowerBI:

- We have a history of changes

- We can see the differences between old and new report

- All changes must be approved to move from one stage to another (dev>test>prod)

The feature that I don't know if we have is the rollback to a previous version, but I think this saves us a lot of time.

[AlexisOlson]

I strongly recommend reading the Data Goblins series on version control:

https://data-goblins.com/power-bi/version-control-pt5

There's some new stuff around development pipelines and .pbip files that's come out since that series but it's still super useful. Personally, I track TE folder structure in Git but don't use pipelines or pbi-tools yet.

[julsr]

Thanks for sharing this! Why are you not using the Deployment Pipelines? And what do you mean with "TE Folders"? 

[AlexisOlson]

The Tabular Editor folder structure is covered in the series.

Deployment pipelines didn't exist when I first started doing version control on Power BI files and I haven't had the need to set up that formal process yet. It would be nice in theory but I haven't had a strong enough reason to change my process to add the extra overhead.