Power BI Feature Discrepancies for Data Acquisition
Power BI churns out new features fast but not all features are available everywhere. As one of the most confusing aspects of Power BI, feature availability depends on the data acquisition method (data import vs live connections) and across Power BI product offerings (Power BI Desktop, Power BI Service, Power BI Report Server, and Power BI Mobile). Microsoft has left gaps in the product documentation and UI to clearly indicate feature availability. For example, while you can add a Q&A button in Power BI Desktop irrespective of whether you import or connect live, the button won’t work with live connections because Q&A for Creators is available only when data is imported.
This blog is my first attempt to clarify the feature availability based on the data acquisition method. All features work when you import data. Therefore, this option is not listed in the table. Direct connections however and not that fortunate. DirectQuery is when you connect directly to all data sources except Analysis Services. Because Power BI knows more about Analysis Services, direct connectivity to Analysis Services is listed separately. A while back I asked Microsoft why certain features are not supported with live connections to Analysis Services, especially to Tabular. To me, there shouldn’t be any difference between data import and using an external Tabular connection. At the end, it’s all Tabular behind the scenes. The answer back then was related to performance concerns for chatty features with external Tabular models. I continue pushing to eliminate these discrepancies if possible over time and provide more feature parity. The table omits features that are supported by the three connectivity options.
| DirectQuery | Live Connection to Analysis Services1 | |
| Binning | Yes | No |
| Calculated column | Yes2 | No |
| Calculated measure | Yes2 | Yes2 |
| Change field data type | Yes | No |
| Change field formatting | Yes | No |
| Clustering | No | No |
| Custom groups | Yes | No |
| Data categories for fields | Yes | No |
| Explain Increase/decrease (Power BI Desktop) | No | No |
| Fields properties | Yes | No |
| Hierarchies | Yes | No |
| Power Query | Yes | No |
| Q&A in dashboards (Q&A for consumers) | No | Tabular only |
| Q&A in reports (Q&A for creators) | No | No |
| Quick Insights (Power BI Service) | No | No |
| Relationships | Yes | No |
| Row-level Security (Power BI Desktop) | Yes | No3 |
| Synonyms | Yes | No |
| What-if | No | No |
- In general, besides calculated measures for Tabular, no modeling features are available with live connections to Analysis Services. This makes sense to avoid a semantic model (Power BI Desktop) over a semantic model in Analysis Services. In fact, Data, Relationships, and Query Editor (Power Query) are not available when connecting directly to Analysis Services.
- See this page for DAX limitations in DirectQuery mode.
- Analysis Services has its own security mechanism.
