01 FAQ
A few clear answers.
What the product does. What qualification means. Where the evidence stops.
01
The product
What it does, and where it fits.
What is Analytical Spine?
A qualification and evidence platform for the documented Fabric/Power BI engineering flow, with a free local core and a separate Hosted attestation ledger in protected preview. The repository working name is Analytical Spine.
Does it build analytics or only check them?
It includes modelling, notebook, DAX and report-producing tools, and connects them with qualification evidence; Fabric and Microsoft services execute the approved platform operations.
Why use it with Microsoft's authoring agents?
Use Microsoft authoring where appropriate, then retain independent expectations, business ratification, evidence bindings and scoped qualification rather than relying on an author's success message.
02
Access & costs
Local rights, preview access and training.
What is free?
The local repository/plugin skills and runtimes are MIT licensed; provider access and Fabric capacity can incur separate costs. Private repository status means public distribution is not implied.
Is Hosted production-ready or taking payments?
It is a protected preview. Production activation, real prices, legal/security publication and live billing remain owner-gated.
Can we use trial Fabric capacity?
The historical programme demonstrated its named path on a trial, but your tenant permissions and capacity must support the required queries/export and Fabric items. PPU alone is insufficient for that path.
Does a paid course or passing gate certify our company or report?
No. Proposed training completion, consultancy partner awards and scoped reporting certificates are separate human-governed processes. None is Microsoft accreditation, statutory financial assurance or a compliance certification.
03
Evidence & trust
What a qualification can tell you.
Do the numbers leave our environment?
Hosted qualification uploads exclude source values and raw evidence. Source/Fabric execution and any external agent provider remain separate data boundaries that you must review.
Does Hosted verify our financial numbers?
It verifies the signed attestation and its authority/bindings. Numerical comparison happens locally against independent expectations; Hosted does not receive enough data to rerun it.
What does “qualified” mean?
The declared required checks passed against current evidence for the named scope and expectations. It does not mean all data, security contexts, future refreshes or business interpretations are correct.
Does it inspect rendered report values?
The current verifier implements bounded Windows OCR checks on authored numeric-label regions. It does not establish every visual's correctness; an explicitly documented empty-state mismatch still refuses qualification.
What happens when data or definitions change?
Observed changes can stale dependent receipts; the newest failed retry supersedes an older pass. Requalification requires fresh observations, and the local ledger does not continuously poll every remote dependency.
04
Working with your stack
Sources, existing assets and assistants.
Can an existing model or warehouse enter midway?
Existing-asset admission has evidence-bound routes; the historical v1 live demonstration covers Gold entry, while newer semantic/report admission code requires its own current scope-specific proof.
Which sources and platforms are covered?
The documented source readers are PostgreSQL and SQL Server; the execution path is Fabric/OneLake and Power BI. dbt admission and optional consumers have separate readiness and proof requirements; Snowflake is deferred.
Can Claude or another assistant ask about qualification?
The preview MCP offers five read-only tools with current grant and value-free output checks. Channel packaging is distinct from a completed live login/listing journey; certification summaries remain unavailable without approved real certificate bindings.
Go deeper.
Explore the language of proof and the boundaries behind it.