What Does Power BI Premium Mean for You?

May 3, 2017/0 Comments/in Blog/by Prologika - Teo Lachev

I’m sure we’ve heard the announcements today about Power BI Premium. In fact, Power BI Premium is so important that Microsoft has positioned it as a new product under the Power BI marketing umbrella name instead of a new licensing model. Microsoft and industry experts covered the announcements well so I won’t reiterate the obvious. You may wonder what these changes mean for you. Let’s summarize.

Power BI Portfolio

In a nutshell, Power BI Premium targets larger organizations which have faced two issues with the current Power BI licensing model:

No “reader” license. If a report has a Power BI Pro features, all users accessing reports would need Power BI Pro license. So, if you a report that used Power BI Pro features, such as gateways or live connections and you won’t this report to be available to 1,000 users, you had to foot $10,000/month bill because everyone required Power BI Pro.
Per user license. A case in point – one year after a successful Power BI hybrid pilot, a Fortune 100 organization has purchased whopping 5 Power BI Pro licenses. There are several reasons for the slow adoption by large companies but one of them is the per-user license.

Large organizations who are seeking a mass Power BI deployment to potentially thousands of users could save big with Power BI Premium (use the nice calculator to find how much). On the downside, I’m not happy about Microsoft requiring Power BI Pro licenses for contributors on top of Power BI Premium.

I don’t see smaller organizations being very much interested in Power BI Premium. For them, a welcome change would be that Power BI Free adds Power BI Pro features. On the downside, Power BI Free loses simple dashboard sharing. This reflects the Microsoft vision about Power BI Free: it is for individual users who are evaluating Power BI. To mitigate the impact of the Power BI Free changes, Microsoft offers one year Power BI Pro trial offer to all Power BI Free users as of May 2nd.

	Today	Starting in June 2017th
Power BI Desktop	Connect to 70+ data sources Data transformations Report creation and exploration	No changes
Power BI Free	No live connections, No gateway connectivity Smaller capacity limits and data refresh rates Only simple dashboard sharing	Access to all data sources Performance equivalent to Power BI Pro No sharing (not even simple dashboard sharing)
Power BI Pro	Access to all data sources Larger capacity limits and data refresh rates All sharing options (simple, workspaces, org content packs)	No changes
Power BI Premium		Increased capacity limits Dedicated environment Content distribution (reader license) Power BI Report Server More features in future, such as in-memory caching, incremental refresh (read the whitepaper)

Personally, I’d like to see more Power BI pricing tiers added, e.g. Standard tiers. Currently, the lowest Power BI Premium tier (P1) is $5,000 per month which would be probably out of reach for smaller organizations. But fear not, you can stay within the old Power BI Pro licensing model.

Power BI Report Server

Microsoft has decoupled SSRS from SQL Server so it gets more frequent updates. SSRS becomes actually two products:

SSRS – This is the SSRS we know it but with no Power BI integration. It will get new RDL features but no Power BI features. See the Microsoft blogs here and here for more details.

Power BI Report Server – Distributed as a standalone installer, Power BI Report Server is a superset SSRS as it gets both existing report types and Power BI reports. As far as the reason for the name change, the Power BI name is a strong brand while SSRS has been associated with the old style paginated reports.

You can get Power BI Report Server in two ways:

As a part of the Power BI Premium bundle. You get the same number as licensed EE cores as the number of v-cores you purchased with Power BI Premium.
Standalone and covered by a SQL Server Enterprise Edition with Software Assurance license, plus Power BI Pro licenses for report authors (as with Power BI Premium).

So, although Power BI Report Server has divorced SQL Server, it’s still covered by its license (kind of when you send your kid to college but she still lives with you). Currently, SQL Server doesn’t check for Software Assurance in any way (there isn’t such SKU). So, it looks like Power BI Premium licensing would be an honor system for customers who want to get it standalone covered by a SQL Server Enterprise Edition license.

Power BI Embedded

Power BI Embedded has been gaining a lot of traction but the problem was that it’s separate from Power BI Service. Consequently, it had to catch up with Power BI Service. For example, it still doesn’t have connectivity to on-premises data sources. The good news is that Power BI Embedded marries Power BI Service so there will be a feature parity and a common set of APIs. The part that I’m not excited about is that its new licensing model requires Power BI Premium (good bye per-session licensing). This might be a showstopper for small ISVs. I hope that Microsoft introduces less expensive pricing tiers to better cater for needs of smaller companies. [Update 6/15/2017: Microsoft announced low-cost EM* plans for Power BI Embedded starting at $625/mo]

Power BI Report Measures Over Tabular Models

May 2, 2017/2 Comments/in Blog/by Prologika - Teo Lachev

The May release of Power BI Desktop adds the ability to define DAX calculated measures when Power BI Desktop is connected live to a Tabular model or Power BI datasets. This is conceptually similar to defining MDX calculated members in Excel connected to a cube. The measure definitions are local to the Power BI Desktop model (the Tabular model is not modified). You can do all measure-related tasks as when you define measures in the data model, such as changing the data type and formatting the measure or changing the home table. In the screenshot below, I’ve defined a YTD report measure over the Adventure Works Tabular model.

Behind the scenes, the DAX query generated by Power BI Desktop adds the measures as query-scoped measures in the /* USER DAX BEGIN/END */ section:

DEFINE MEASURE ‘Reseller Sales'[Reseller Sales YTD] =

(/* USER DAX BEGIN */

TOTALYTD(SUM(‘Reseller Sales'[Sales Amount]), ‘Date'[Date])

/* USER DAX END */)

EVALUATE

ROW(

“Reseller_Total_Sales”, ‘Reseller Sales'[Reseller Total Sales],

“Reseller Sales YTD”, ‘Reseller Sales'[Reseller Sales YTD]

)

Report-level measures are a welcome enhancement. Bringing this further, I’d like to see the ability to define report-level measures using the Quick Measure feature. Another feature that I’m waiting for is the ability to use custom measures (both defined in the model and report-level) in the new numeric range slicer (currently in preview).

Important Power BI Announcements on May 3rd

April 29, 2017/0 Comments/in Blog/by Prologika - Teo Lachev

Please make sure you register free and join Microsoft Business Forward online event (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/business-forward) on May 3rd at 10 AM ET.

Join Satya Nadella (CEO Microsoft), James Phillips (Corporate Vice President, Business Applications, Platform and Intelligence), Judson Althoff (Executive Vice President, Worldwide Commercial Business) for major announcements and details on the “new generation” of Power BI, Dynamics 365 applications, LinkedIn, and the Microsoft Cloud.

This should be an important event not to miss!

Atlanta MS BI Group Meeting on April 24th

April 22, 2017/0 Comments/in Blog, Events/by Prologika - Teo Lachev

MS BI fans, join me for the next must-attend Atlanta MS BI and Power BI Group meeting on April 24th at 6:30 PM. Mike Bruce and Alex Higgins from Acuity Brands will share how they use Power BI to improve their development process. Acuity Brands will sponsor the event. And I’ll demo the new Quick Measures Power BI measure.

Presentation:	Using Power BI to Track Software Development Performance
	Level: Intermediate
Date:	April 24, 2017
Time	6:30 – 8:30 PM ET
Place:	South Terraces Building (Auditorium Room) 115 Perimeter Center Place Atlanta, GA 30346
Overview:	By using Power BI, Acuity Brands can monitor development teams’ progress with rich, interactive dashboards. Data from Visual Studio Team Services ODATA feeds and APIs as well as pulling data from DocumentDB, teams can drill into their development performance and see where they may be having development performance. Data is accessed via embedded Power BI reports running on dedicated hardware throughout development team spaces as well as accessible via the web using SSO!
Speaker:	Mike Bruce has been developing software for the past 22 years focusing on Microsoft products. He is currently runs the DevOps and QA team for Platform Architecture at Acuity Brands. Alex Higgins recently joined Acuity Brands via the Leadership Program. He has lead the effort to build custom visuals in PowerBI as well as creating embedded reports.
Sponsor:	Acuity Brands is the North American market leader and one of the world’s leading providers of lighting solutions for both indoor and outdoor applications. We provide customer-driven smart and simple lighting solutions that offer quality lighting and value-added benefits by empowering world-class talent to create and leverage our industry-leading portfolio of products, technology, and services; drive world-class cost efficiency; and leverage a culture of continuous improvement.

Tabular DAX Editor

April 22, 2017/0 Comments/in Blog/by Prologika - Teo Lachev

The Tabular toolset is getting better. One thing that I miss from Multidimensional is the cube script that lets you view all custom calculations in one place so that you can organize them any way you want, add comments, etc. This is why I contributed to the DAX Editor tool. Microsoft has taken notice and introduced a tool (also called DAX Editor) in the latest SSDT release. Read Kay Unkroth’s announcement here.

The Microsoft DAX Editor supports the old XML-based schema and the new JSON schema. On the upside, it gives you a break from the Measure Grid and the formula bar. On the downside, you can work only on one measure at the time. So, let’s leave it to marinate it a few more months with the hope that we can finally have a Tabular script. As Kay commented at the end of his blog post there is a hope:

Yes, we are hearing this a lot from you guys! Having all expressions in a single document makes it easy to find and replace, search, etc. It’s on the backlog, but not yet on the top of the priorities. Looking at the higher prio work we still need to get done , it’s more mid-termish. But we know how we want to achieve this and we are laying down the foundation with this DAX Editor. Btw. it is much, much more than just an editor window. That is really just the tip of the iceberg. Same with the DAX query window in SSSM. The real beauty (and complexity) is in the DAX parser behind these windows, and a few other features like IntelliSense. It’s coming together. Brick by brick!

Meanwhile, use the community DAX Editor.

Automating Excel to Power BI Publishing

April 18, 2017/0 Comments/in Blog/by Prologika - Teo Lachev

Excel 2016 added a Publish to Power BI menu to let you export or connect Excel workbooks to Power BI. You can read more about this Excel feature here. One area where Excel is still ahead of Power BI Desktop is that is has an object model that lets you automate tasks with VBA. Unfortunately, Power BI Desktop doesn’t have an object model so you have to resort to unsupported ways (aka hacks) to automate tasks, such as refreshing and publishing to Power BI. I discussed some here.

I’ve noticed that Microsoft added not yet documented PublishToPBI method to Excel 2016. With it, refreshing the Excel data model and publishing it to Power BI Service takes two lines of code (you’d need more code to open the Excel workbook from an external application).

Sub Macro1()

ActiveWorkbook.Model.Refresh

ActiveWorkbook.PublishToPBI PublishType:=msoPBIExport, nameConflict:= msoPBIAbort, bstrGroupName:=”<Some Workspace>”

End Sub

Power BI Quick Measures

April 3, 2017/0 Comments/in Blog/by Prologika - Teo Lachev

One of the most common complaints raised by Power BI customers is the DAX steep learning curve. The April release of Power BI Desktop introduces a feature called Quick Measures. Currently in preview (make sure to enable Quick Measures from File ð Options and settings ð Options, Preview features), Quick Measures are supposed to replace Quick Calcs. Besides supporting only a limited number of packaged calculations and not working on top of custom measures, the problem with Quick Calcs is that they don’t show the DAX formulas so there isn’t a way for you to learn from the work Microsoft did or to change the formulas to customize their behavior. This changes with Quick Measures.

You can create a Quick Measure over implicit or explicit measures. To do so, once you add a field to the report, expand the measure drop-down in the Fields of the Visualizations pane, and the click “Quick measures”. Then, select the calculation type. Currently, Power BI Desktop supports about 20 quick measures organized in four categories: Aggregate by category (average, min, max, variance), Filters (filtered value, difference or percentage from filtered value), Time intelligence (YTD, QTD, MTD, and their variances), Running total, Mathematical operations (additions, subtractions, division, multiplication, percentage difference).

For some obscure reason, the YTD quick measure I tried works only with an inline date hierarchy (Power BI Desktop can auto-generate an inline date hierarchy when you add a Date field to the report). But fear not! Once you create the quick measure, it becomes a regular measure and it gets added to the Fields list. Which means that you can change its formula! This is the auto-generated one.

SalesAmount YTD =

IF(

ISFILTERED(‘Date'[Date]),

ERROR(“Time intelligence quick measures can only be grouped or filtered by the Power BI-provided date hierarchy”),

TOTALYTD(SUM(‘ResellerSales'[SalesAmount]), ‘Date'[Date].[Date])

)

And this is how to get it work with any field in your Date table.

SalesAmount YTD = TOTALYTD(SUM(‘ResellerSales'[SalesAmount]), ‘Date'[Date])

Quick Measures are a welcome upgrade of Quick Calcs. They are designed to help you add common calculations and help you learn DAX.

Atlanta MS BI Group Meeting on March 27th

March 23, 2017/0 Comments/in Blog, Events/by Prologika - Teo Lachev

MS BI fans, join me for the next Atlanta MS BI and Power BI Group meeting on Monday, March 27th at 6:30 PM. Dave Tangren and Nelson Davis from Slalom will compare Power BI to Tableau. Slalom will sponsor the event. I’ll show the latest of the Power BI Matrix visual. It will be a great meeting!

Presentation:	Comparing Power BI to Tableau
	Level: Intermediate
Date:	March 27, 2017
Time	6:30 – 8:30 PM ET
Place:	South Terraces Building (Auditorium Room) 115 Perimeter Center Place Atlanta, GA 30346
Overview:	Power BI is getting stronger all the time. So is its competition. Want to see how Power BI stacks up against Tableau? Come see our thought leaders from Slalom debate the points!
Speaker:	Dave Tangren is a Practice Area Leader for Slalom in Atlanta. Dave brings thought leadership in visual analytics and business discovery to the market. With his deep background in Microsoft technologies, we can bet we know who Dave will be representing in this presentation. Nelson Davis is passionate about data storytelling, Tableau evangelism, data for good and providing innovative solutions to drive business impact. Nelson helps lead Slalom’s data visualization team in Atlanta, and regularly presents at the Atlanta Tableau User’s Group. Former Tableau Zen Master, multiple time winner of Viz of the Day, and speaker at TCC13, DATA15 and DATA16.
Sponsor:	Slalom is a purpose-driven consulting firm that helps companies solve business problems and build for the future. We’re a team of thinkers, makers, and doers that came from enterprises, consultancies, agencies, and startups—all attracted by the promise of loving work and life. Our teams are deeply connected and bring their shared experiences and insights across industries, disciplines, and markets to each and every engagement.
Prototypes with Pizza	“The Matrix Reloaded” by Teo Lachev will demo the latest enhancements to the Power BI Matrix visual.

“Get the Most Out of Power BI” Seminar on May 3rd

March 21, 2017/0 Comments/in Blog, Events/by Prologika - Teo Lachev

Patrick LeBlanc and I will deliver a free seminar “Get the Most Out of Power BI” on May 3rd, 8:30 AM to 12 PM, at the Microsoft Office in Alpharetta.

You won’t want to miss this educational and engaging event! Please register today as seating is limited at https://prologika.com/event/get-the-most-out-of-power-bi/.

Power BI is about empowering all types of users to get insights from data. It consists of the Power BI Service (powerbi.com), Power BI Desktop, Power BI Mobile, and Power BI Embedded, and it comes in two pricing options: Power BI Free and Power BI Pro. Power BI enjoys a tremendous momentum and industry observers has given it high scores. Packed with a dizzying variety of features, Power BI supports different solutions but it might be difficult to understand which features you need to reduce licensing cost.

Join Prologika and Microsoft for a 3-hour free seminar on Wednesday, May 3rd, 8:30 AM -12 PM ET, at the Microsoft Office in Alpharetta, when Teo Lachev (CEO of Prologika) and Patrick LeBlanc (Data Platform Solutions Architect at Microsoft) share practical knowledge and experience to help you get the most out of Power BI. If you’re planning Power BI rollout in your organization, this event is for you. Join Prologika and Microsoft for a 3-hour free seminar on Wednesday, May 3rd, 8:30 AM -12 PM ET, at the Microsoft Office in Alpharetta, when Teo Lachev (CEO of Prologika) and Patrick LeBlank (Data Platform Solutions Architect at Microsoft) share practical knowledge and experience to help you get the most out of Power BI. If you’re planning Power BI rollout in your organization, this event is for you.

Learn tips and tricks to stay within Power BI Free and reduce cost, including:

Simple sharing
Content service packs
Avoid gateways for refreshing imported data
Deploy Power BI reports on-premises
Share reports with external users

Power BI customer stories from the frontline

Learn how other customers use Power BI
Learn top customer issues when adopting Power BI that we have faced
Explore different problems and how we have fixed them

Ask questions and get them answered

“7 Ways to Integrate Excel with Power BI” Presentation on April 19th