Shared and certified datasets

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Organizations embracing a data culture will have many individuals authoring reports, often using the same source data. This agility helps ensure the use of data is pervasive, but it also introduces governance challenges. With many users referencing the same source data, it creates duplicate work to keep all instances of the source data up to date within Power BI and it can be hard to maintain a single source of truth for data and important business metrics to be used consistently.

The data model behind a Power BI report or an Analysis Services model is excellent tools to build enterprise-wide semantic models that capture these important metrics, fostering reuse and maintaining the single source of truth. Now, with shared and certified datasets in Power BI, allowing users to discover those authoritative models is much easier.

Shared datasets can be used across workspaces—that is, a report in workspace A can refer to a dataset in workspace B. This way, an organization can set up a number of trusted and reliable datasets in a specific workspace and can enable analysts across the org to work with this data in their own workspaces to create new reports and dashboards. A new permission model ensures that only the right users get access to those datasets; a new dataset discovery experience (shown below) provides users with a single pane of glass to easily find all datasets they have access to. This discovery experience will be consistent in both the service and the desktop.

Certified datasets make it easier for organizations to steer users toward trusted and authoritative datasets. This "stamp of approval" for a dataset can only be applied by a specific group of Power BI users as defined in a new tenant setting. Once a dataset is certified, it shows up prominently in the new dataset discovery experience, making sure report authors can effortlessly find and leverage these high-quality sources of data.