Power Query: From No-code to Low-code Enterprise ETL

I had the honor and pleasure to speak in Milwaukee’s Power BI User Group and share my thoughts on Power Query and its trajectory to evolve as an enterprise low-code ETL. Thank you Mike and Seth for inviting me. You are the best! You can watch the recording below (It is also available on PowerBI.tips YouTube channel here).

In the session I cover the journey Power Query had made from a data wrangling self-service tool in Excel and Power BI into a game-changing enterprise asset.

As Power Query becomes more prevalent in Power BI and Power Platform dataflows, and will hopefully evolve from its current limited preview mode in Azure Data Factory to a fully integrated technology, I see an amazing opportunity for Power Query data wranglers to make bigger impact in centralized enterpise-wide programs.

Until we get there, I recommend that you start taking Power Query and M more seriously and use it as early as you can in new BI projects. You can already use it to stage data in Azure Data Lake Gen2 and Common Data Services and from there take it anywhere where good cleaned data is needed.

For those of you who are enterprise developers – Please note that I don’t pitch for low-code ETL to replace pro-code ETL. But I do think you should include it in any project as your rapid-prototyping, testing layer, and whenever you can, start developing with low-code and then gradually release the pro-code while maintaining the low-code as a key element in your test environment.

Power BI is not only a visualization tool (Read my article here). Users of Power Query report a significant impact on their business (Read the 2-year old survey results here).

Hope you will enjoy the recording.

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