Earlier this month, Microsoft kicked off the Dynamics 365 and Power Platform 2021 release wave 1, with a planned rollout for hundreds of new capabilities for both platforms, with new features for Power BI being showcased as well. A couple of days later, the firm announced object-level security for both the Premium and Pro variants of its data visualization platform.
Today, Microsoft has unveiled the April update for Power BI On-premises data gateway, highlighting new introductions which include PowerShell enhancements. For comparison, the update in February focused primarily only on the deprecation of some services, as well as the .NET 4.8 framework being made a requirement for all new Gateway installations.
To start off, the PowerShell cmdlets released last year to automate gateway installation and management have now been improved, with the following additions being noted:
- Ability to view a gateway data source using “Get-DataGatewayClusterDatasource”.
- Allow adding and removing of Service Principals as Data source users using Add-DataGatewayClusterUser.
- Documentation updates for Add-DataGatewayCluster, Add-DataGatewayClusterUser and Add-DataGatewayClusterDatasourceUser
Other changes include the ability to test SSO configuration and SSO for refresh hitting GA. As far as the former is concerned, SSO through Kerberos constrained delegation or Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) via gateways can be tested in 'Advanced Settings' under the 'Manage Gateways' page. The latter, meanwhile, was released in public preview last year and provides usage of SSO via Kerberos for DirectQuery and Import queries.
As always, the same query execution logic/run-time as in the April Power BI Desktop version will be taken by reports published through the Gateway. The latest version of the standard mode gateway can be downloaded here, while the personal gateway can be downloaded here.
