I was working on a demo for my upcoming Pluralsight

It used to be that you could look at the data model and see a version number.

But now, it’s almost entirely unintelligible. The only thing you can read is “This backup was created using xpress 9 compression.”

A little

When imported into power bi Desktop, the new compression model is dramatically more efficient. 184 KB versus 2,288 KB.

What I haven’t figured out yet is if this impacts in-memory use or just when it’s saved to disk. Still it’s nice to see Microsoft continuing to make improvements.