Chris, this looks useful, does it require Power BI Premium or will it work for Pro? Maybe that’s two questions for Desktop and Service?
You do not need Premium to do this – you can attach an external CDM folder when your workspace is in shared capacity. After that, all your end users need is access to the workspace.
Great job puzzling this out. I don’t think the CDM standard will include ability to define DAX calculations since CDM is a general entity specification used by multiple Microsoft services. Although, having the ability to define custom metadata in the spec and then stuffing DAX calculations in it and then auto-generating the Power BI model has some possibilities.
Chris, do you think dataflows is the mechanism to accomplish the equivalent of cube write-backs? We’ve just been missing a way to write data from Power BI and now we have it and with multiple files in one folder you can even call it partition-based write-backs. For example, if you have a forecast dataset from source system and we create a forecast_override dataset from a spreadsheet that will allow what-if analysis and combining the two data sets for Power BI reporting will yield most of the benefit of writeback.
Interestingly the model.json files for dataflows created in Power BI do include the M code for queries used, so I don’t see why they couldn’t include DAX too.
Re writeback… Hmm, interesting idea. Maybe it is possible but I would need to think about it.