The September release of Power BI Desktop brings Quick Insights in the form of the very nice Explain Increase/Decrease feature (in preview). Suppose you have a column chart and you see a sudden increase or decrease in the chart series. You can now right-click on the bar and then click Analyze, Explain the Decrease menu. This runs the Quick Insights machine learning algorithms to predict what caused the anomaly. As in Power BI Service, Quick Insights produces several reports.
In this case, one of the Quick Insights visuals informs me that most of the decrease is contributed to the bad performance of one of the sales reps (Stephen Jiang). I could have sliced and diced all day long but I could have found this myself. If I find a particular Quick Insight visual useful, I can add it to the report. From that point, I can use just like any other visual on the report.
The Power BI Desktop Explain Increase/Decrease helps you performing root cause analysis in a blink of an eye.
Currently in the preview, the feature is rough around the edges. For example, I was able to get it to work only if I add a field from a Date table, such as Calendar Year, to the chart. Other limitations include:
You can’t use it if your visual includes:
TopN filters
Include/exclude filters
Measure filters
Non-additive measures and aggregates
Show value as
Filtered measures (it’s the new thing we use for scatter chart in insights)
Categorical columns on X-axis unless it defines a sort by column that is scalar. If using a hierarchy, then every column in the active hierarchy has to match this condition
Non-numeric measures: Model measure support is limited to sum and count only right now.
The September release of Power BI Desktop adds two very useful features: drilling through another page and explain increase/decrease. SSRS practitioners might find “page drillthrough” similar to SSRS actions. However, instead of navigating to another report, it allows the user to navigate to another page within the same report (at least for now cross-report drillthrough is not supported). Although not as flexible as SSRS actions, PBI page drillthrough expands the Power BI data exploration capabilities. Previously, you had the following drillthrough options:
Dashboard drillthrough – Clicking on a dashboard tile navigates you to the underlying report assuming the tile was produced by pinning a report visual.
See records – This chart-level features allows you to right click a bar and see the data behind it.
I won’t repeat the Microsoft intro (watch it here) but I’ll add a few more notes that the demo doesn’t cover and I find very useful. Consider this report which has two pages: Sales page that shows a sales summary and Customer Orders page that is defined as a drillthrough page. The idea here is to allow the user to drill from the sales summary to the Customers Orders to see the data in more detail.
To “define” the Customer Orders page as a drillthrough target, I had to only add CalendarYear and SalesTerritoryCountry fields to the new Drillthrough Filters area in the Visualizations pane. This is conceptually similar to defining parameters in an SSRS drillthrough report. Interestingly, the summary page automatically detects if the visual has one of the fields used in the Drillthrough Filters area. If it does, it automatically enables the Drillthrough context menu. The context menu is activated even if the summary page has just one of the fields defined as drillthrough filters. For example, if the Sales visual has only Calendar Year, the drillthrough page would show all customer orders for that year. If it has also SalesTerritoryCountry, the drillthrough page would show orders for that year and for that country. If the Sales visual has none of the fields used for drillthrough filters, then Drillthrough won’t show up. In other words, Power BI automatically matches the source fields and drillthrough filters and this saves you a lot of configuration steps, such as to configure parameters, to check which field exist and to pass All to the parameters that don’t exist!
Page BI page drillthrough was one of the most requested features by the community. I’d love to see it extended with the following options in future:
Expression-based filters – This applies not only to drillthrough filters but the other filter types. For example, it will be great to default the filter to value using an expression, e.g. =IF(SELECTEDVALUE()==”, <some value>).
Ability to drill to pages in other reports.
Multiple context-aware drillthrough actions – For example, SSRS allows you define an action for each report element. Currently, PBI page drillthrough takes the entire row context and you can’t define drillthrough targets for specific fields.
Mark your calendar for the next meeting of our Atlanta MS and Power BI Group on September 25th when we will compare Power BI and Qlik.
Presentation:
Did Qlik run out of BI Power?
Level: Intermediate
Date:
September 25, 2017
Time
6:30 – 8:30 PM ET
Place:
South Terraces Building (Auditorium Room)
115 Perimeter Center Place
Atlanta, GA 30346
Overview:
Haters are gonna hate. Lovers are gonna love. What about you? Come decide by yourself whether you are a Qlik or a PBI guy/gal. This presentation is intended for anyone who wants to see these two BI tools in action. Carlos and Daniel will show the differences and similarities between QlikView and Power BI. They will perform side-by-side the following:
Extract and transform data
Create a data model (so to allow cross filtering)
Compare features side by side, including hiding/displaying visuals, creating linked objects, role-playing dimensions, what-if scenarios
Create a nice dashboard (which tool can actually do it?)
Speaker:
Carlos Rodrigues has more than 18 years’ experience as an IT professional and has successfully proven that he is especially adept at translating complex business needs into flawlessly Business Intelligence solutions. In his current role, Director- IT with Brightstar Device Protection, he holds the responsibility of defining the strategic roadmap and overseeing the implementation of the company’s Business Intelligence. He is a recent Georgia Tech MBA graduate (go Jackets 🐝). He enjoys traveling to different places around the world, appreciating the local culture, savoring local culinary styles and mainly, taking thousands of photos using his Nikon gear.
Daniel Granadillo is a Business Intelligence Architect / Developer with more than 10 years of experience around Data Warehouse and Analytics projects. Advocate of the Microsoft BI stack and discovered love at first sight with SSIS. You can find me enjoying the outdoors when not embraced with SQL Server
Sponsor:
Accelebrate is an IT training firm headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, USA that provides on-site and online training on a wide variety of technologies for clients in North America, Europe, and worldwide. Accelebrate is a Prime Sponsor of the Atlanta Microsoft BI and Power BI Group.
https://prologika.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/logo.png00Prologika - Teo Lachevhttps://prologika.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/logo.pngPrologika - Teo Lachev2017-09-07 15:01:122021-02-17 01:01:06Power BI vs Qlik Presentation
Veteran Excel users might have used the Excel What-if feature that let you try several different sets of values in one or more formulas to explore various outcomes (scenarios). The August release of Power BI Desktop introduces a similar feature. You start by defining a What If parameter from the Modeling tab.
Don’t confuse the What If parameter with a query parameter which is used in query parameter-driven properties, such as to change the data source the query connects to.
In the process of configuring the parameter, you define hardcoded minimum, maximum, and increment values. The outcome is two DAX measures. The first one generates the scale, while the second returns the selected value.
Discount Percentage Value = SELECTEDVALUE(‘Discount Percentage'[Discount Percentage])
Next, you can use the “Value” measure as any DAX measure. Typically, you would create a target measure that somehow depends on the What If parameter, e.g.:
Now you can see how the target value changes when you change the What If value.
Power BI What If parameters allow you to parameterize you DAX measures. Continuing on the same path, I’d like to see expression-based properties and filters, as well as the ability to parameterize fields on the report, such as to present the user with a list of measures, and rebind visualizations after the user selects which measure they want to see on the report.
Related to the previous blog, let’s show how to create a detail report in Power BI that mimics an Excel PivotTable report in a flattened layout. Consider the report below. To create it, use the Matrix visual and add the necessary fields to the Rows bucket and measures to the Values bucket. By default and similar to Excel, Matrix would use a Stepped layout so that each time you expand a field, the next field would use the same column to minimize horizontal space. In the Format tab, in the “Row headers” section there is a setting “Stepped layout” that is easy to miss. When you switch it to Off, Matrix is now configured to mimic the Excel Tabular (flattened) report layout. Now right-click on the report each field that you want to expand, and then click “Expand to next level”.
There are currently two limitations that I hope will be lifted soon. There isn’t an option to expand all fields in one step so you have to expand one field at the time. More importantly, currently there isn’t a way to disable specific totals. The “Total row” option in the Format tab toggles on/off all subtotals. Having report subtotals might lead to a performance issue (see my previous blog for more detail). UPDATE 8/14/2017 – The latter limitation has been lifted in the August release of Power BI Desktop, which now supports configuring row subtotals per level (turn the “Per row level” to on in the Subtotals section of the Format tab) .
After Tableau and SiSense, Keeping ’em Honest continues with Qlik. Now, after they sold the company and took a hit in the latest Gartner’s quadrant, I didn’t expect much of a completion from Qlik but every now and then I run into a customer considering Qlik and willing to share Qlik’s feedback on how Qlik outshines Power BI in every possible way (can’t share these documents due to NDA although they are interesting and entertaining stories). But to be fair to Power BI, I’ll enumerate next a few reasons that customers have shared of why they prefer Power BI over Qlik and from my experience in in helping several customers transition to Power BI from Qlik. I’ll focus on Qlik Sense, which is the Qlik’s latest tool that competes head to head with Power BI.
Chasing the perfect tool (hint: there is none)? Instead, focus on architecture and data quality. Tools come and go, and they tend to leapfrog each other. Data quality and good foundation stays on.
Data Acquisition
Connectors – the data journey starts with connecting to your data. According to Qlik’s documentation, it offers a very small set of connectors. By contrast, Power BI supports over 70 connectors and the list growing every month.
Content packs – In Power BI, content packs delivered by Microsoft partners allow business users to get pre-packaged reports and dashboards from popular cloud services, such as Dynamics CRM, Salesforce, Google Analytics, Marketo, and many more, directly in Power BI Service (no need to use Power BI Desktop). No such a feature exists in Qlik.
Complexity – One prevailing theme I hear from Qlik users is complexity where the tool requires the end user to be a developer to create scripts and import data. In fact, I know of a large organization in Atlanta which has hired a consulting company to create and maintain Qlik reports. So much about the self-service BI story. By contrast, Power BI Service and Power BI Desktop include user-friendly wizards.
Data transformation – In Power BI Desktop, a data analyst can use the Query Editor to define repeatable steps to transform and cleanse the data before it’s imported in the data model. The Query Editor (Power Query in Excel) resonates well with business users. No such a tool exists in the Qlik world
Data Model
Associative data model – Qlik continues to tout the “associative data model” (learn more in this video and its related videos on YouTube). Besides the self-service vs organizational BI propaganda, nothing new here that Power BI can’t do. As far as the extolled virtues of the “associative data model”, I couldn’t agree more with what Donald Farmer (a former Vice President at Qlik) had to say a while back. “Talking of engines, some have been misled to believe that QlikView’s supposed “associative analysis” represents some significant engine smarts. I have even heard analysts very misleadingly say that QlikView has “association rules” – implying some kind of data mining, such as Microsoft implements in its Data Mining server and Excel Add-ins. QlikView add to the confusion by talking about an associative “architectural model.” However, despite the hype, as Curt Monash points out (or rather, painfully extracted from QlikTech themselves through a long thread of comments) it is not so: “The associative aspect is really more meaningful in describing the end user experience, in that you see visually what is associated and is not associated with any particular selection or drilldown.” As Curt says, “Thank you for admitting that clearly!!! It wastes a fair amount of analysts’ time when your company pretends otherwise.” So, the associative model is nothing more that the relationship auto-discovery in Power BI Desktop.
Data model capabilities — I said this many times and I’ll say it again – no other tool on the market comes even close to Power BI as far as its modeling capabilities which allow business users to create self-service data models that are on a par with models created by BI pros.
Calculations – In Power BI, we use DAX, a language that is far more powerful than Qlik expressions.
Platform
Ecosystem — No matter how good it is, a self-service visualization tool addresses only a small subset of data analytics needs. By contrast, Power BI is a part of the Microsoft Data Platform that allows you to implement versatile solutions and use Power BI as a presentation layer. Want to implement a real-time dashboard from data streams? Azure Stream Analytics and IoT integrates Power BI. What to show reports on the desktop from natural questions? Cortana lets you do it by typing questions or voice. Want to implement smart reports with predicted results? Power BI can integrate with Azure Machine Learning? Want to publish SSRS and Excel reports alongside interactive reports? Power BI supports this. Expect this strength to increase as Cortana Analytics Suite and prepackaged solutions evolve.
Scalability and continuum – Despite Qlik’s scalability white papers that claim to scale to billions of rows, a desktop tool can get you up to a few million rows. Even if its technology can scale to much bigger data volumes, working with gigabyte files is no fun. Not to mention that you’d probably wouldn’t want millions for rows imported and exported all the time. At some point, you have to consider moving your models to a dedicated server. In MS BI, you can transition from Power BI Desktop to Tabular on the server. Same technology, same interfaces. In fact, I tell students that if you know Power BI Desktop, you already know 80% of Tabular. What’s Qlik’s continuum story?
On your terms – Power BI lets you deploy your report to the cloud Power BI Service and on premises to the Power BI Report Server. Qlik is predominantly on-premises solution with a fledgling cloud offering. Besides, Qlik Sense Cloud is more expensive at $25/month vs $10/mo in Power BI (if you decide to go cloud).
Analytics
Natural language – No equivalent to Power BI Q&A which allows business users to ask natural questions. Qlik has a basic story telling via the Narrative Data Science and so does Power BI.
Advanced analytics – No integration with R or built-in machine learning capabilities, such as Quick Insights in Power BI.
Real-time dashboards – Qlik doesn’t have the API to allow developers to push data to a dashboard that updates in real time.
Geospatial reporting – Qlik’s geospatial reporting is not as robust as Power BI. For example, Power BI offers at least four mapping visualizations, including ShapeMap (supports custom shapes) and ArcGIS
Openness
Reporting tools – Reporting tools come and go. If make a decision to go with Qlik, can you use another reporting tool to connect to it? By contrast, in Power BI you can analyze your data with any DAX or MDX capable tool, such as Excel.
Custom visuals – Qlik claims that it can integrate with D3.js to allow developers to create custom visuals. In reality, Qlik extensions basically spit out HTML. By contrast, Power BI custom visuals adhere to predefine interfaces. What this means for a developer is that it’s much easier to implement and test custom visuals in Power BI.
Other
Cost – I’ll let you do your own math here but the number one reason customers gravitate to Power BI is cost.
Speed – Power BI gets new features every month. How often is Qlik updated?
https://prologika.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/logo.png00Prologika - Teo Lachevhttps://prologika.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/logo.pngPrologika - Teo Lachev2017-06-22 09:46:162021-02-17 01:01:43Power BI vs. Qlik
As I mentioned in my Spring newsletter “15 Reasons Why Microsoft is Leading the BI Space”, Microsoft BI is enjoying resurgent interest from customers and industry observers, and Power BI gets lots of attention. I’m sure that you’ve also heard the announcements about Power BI Premium – a new dedicated licensing model for Power BI. In fact, Power BI Premium is so important to Microsoft that it’s positioned as a new product under the Power BI umbrella name instead of a new licensing model. In this newsletter, I’ll discuss what Power BI means for you and why you should strongly consider it. If you live in these cities, consider joining me at SQL Saturday Chattanooga on June 24th or the Atlanta MS BI Group on June 26th when I’ll present “Understanding Power BI Premium” and discuss its inner workings in more detail. My June calendar has the details about these events.
Why Power BI Premium?
According to Microsoft, for less than 2 years since Power BI became generally available, more than 5 million users are currently using it. As the product matures, the following growing pain points have emerged:
Per-user licensing model – Large organizations find it difficult to license Power BI per user. 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.
Cost prohibitive with large user base – The per-user licensing model doesn’t include a “reader” license. If a report has a Power BI Pro features, all users accessing reports would need Power BI Pro licenses. 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.
Performance – Power BI Service is a shared cloud environment. Although no one has shared performance issues with me, it’s possible that the performance of your reports might be negatively affected by other organizations.
No “premium” features – When I teach Power BI I often get feedback that some missing features, such as caching and incremental refresh, are important. This goes back to performance but the reason why they are not currently available is because they might impact performance in a shared environment.
Confusing licensing – Previously, there was some overlap between Power BI Free and Power BI Pro. Many organizations find it very difficult to navigate what features are available where.
What’s There to Like in Power BI Premium?
There are several reasons why Power BI might be appealing to your organization.
To start with, larger organizations can save on licensing cost. If all users would need access to reports with Pro features, the breakpoint at which Power BI Premium reduces cost is above 500 users. That’s because, Power BI Premium allows Power BI Free users to access Pro content without Power BI Pro licenses. You can use the Power BI Premium calculator to experiment with what-if scenarios and calculate your licensing cost.
Cost savings is not the only reason to consider Power BI Premium. You also get dedicated capacity. When you purchase Power BI Premium, you buy a dedicated environment for your organization. Think of it as buying a dedicated IaaS service, such as an Azure VM, versus a PaaS service, such as an Azure SQL Database, that is shared with other users on the same server. For more information about how this works and what Premium plans are available, read the Power BI Premium whitepaper.
Almost organization I’ve consulted with has the need to embed reports for a third party. Previously, if you want to embed Power BI reports, you had to use the Azure Power BI Embedded Service, which was separate from the Power BI Service. Consequently, Power BI Embedded 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 (Power BI Premium = Power BI Service + Power BI Embedded) so there will be feature parity. If you are concerned about the increased licensing cost (Power BI Embedded has an hourly-based session licensing model), Microsoft unveiled low-cost Power BI Premium plans targeted to report embedding only and starting at $625/month.
Another appealing detail concerning embedded analytics is that unlike Power BI Premium which requires reports authors to have Power BI Pro licenses, creating new embedded reports or changing existing embedded reports by external users don’t require a Power BI Pro license. Of course, if your organization purchases a Power BI Premium plan, such as P1 starting at $5,000/month, not only will you be able to use Power BI Premium for internal use, but you can also embed reports for external customers. In other words, one Power BI Premium license covers both internal and external reporting.
Finally, Power BI Premium-only features are in the works, such as real-time caching by pinning datasets to memory, incremental dataset refresh, secondary model copies for disaster recovery, and geo replicas to reduce latency by replicating instances around the world.
Changes to the Power BI Portfolio
You might wonder how Power BI Premium impacts your current Power BI usage. The table below shows how Power BI Premium changes the Power BI portfolio.
Today
Future
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
Power BI Pro feature parity 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 (read the whitepaper)
So, don’t panic! You can continue using Power BI under the current per-user licensing model (Power BI Free and Power BI Pro) if Power BI Premium makes no sense to you. Another good news is that Power BI Free now has all the Power BI Pro features, so hopefully we won’t see “This report requires Power BI Pro license” anymore. The bad news is that with per-user licensing, Power BI Free is for individual use only. A Power BI Free user can’t share any Power BI content (not even simple dashboard sharing). And, unless you purchase Power BI Premium, content can’t be shared with Power BI Free users (Both inbound and outbound sharing are not available for Power BI Free users).
Power BI Report Server
Delivering on its on-premises reporting roadmap, Microsoft has extended SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) to support Power BI reports. The extended SSRS will be known as Power BI Report Server. Moreover, Microsoft has decoupled SSRS from SQL Server so it gets more frequent updates. Moving forward, SSRS becomes 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 integration features.
Power BI Report Server – It gets both RDL and Power BI features. 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 plan where you get the same number of licensed on-premises cores as the v-cores you purchased within your Power BI Premium plan. You can use these licensed cores only for Power BI Premium Report Server (SQL Server requires a separate license if you install it on the same box as Power BI Premium Report Server).
Standalone and covered by a SQL Server Enterprise Edition with Software Assurance license. Currently, SQL Server doesn’t check for Software Assurance in any way (there isn’t such SKU). So, Power BI Premium licensing would be an honor system for customers who want to get it standalone (with SQL Server Enterprise Edition licenses).
So, although Power BI Premium Report Server has divorced SQL Server, you can still cover by the SQL Server license (kind of when you send your kid to college but she still lives with you). In both cases, developers publishing Power BI reports to the Power BI Report Server will require a Power BI Pro license at $9.99/user/mo.
As you’d probably agree, the BI landscape is fast-moving and it might be overwhelming. If you need any help with planning and implementing your next-generation BI solution, don’t hesitate to contact me. As a Microsoft Gold Partner and premier BI firm, you can trust us to help you plan and implement your data analytics projects, and rest assured that you’ll get the best service. Regards,
Teo Lachev
Teo Lachev President and Owner Prologika, LLC | Making Sense of Data Microsoft Partner | Gold Data Analytics
Issue: You want to use the Power BI Excel Publisher but it doesn’t load. You look at the Excel add-ins and you see that it’s deactivated. You try to activate it and then you get an error.
Solution: Copy the following Office PIA files to the add-in folder (C:\Program Files\Microsoft Power BI Publisher for Excel\bin).
Microsoft.Office.Interop.SQLIS.12.0.nupkg
OFFICE.dll
Unfortunately, I don’t know where these files are located. They were given to me by the Microsoft Support and I can’t redistribute. If you can’t find them, you can call MS support and reference support case: 117041015581533.
Now when you open Excel, you should see the Power BI ribbon tab.
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]
https://prologika.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/logo.png00Prologika - Teo Lachevhttps://prologika.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/logo.pngPrologika - Teo Lachev2017-05-03 22:51:392017-06-17 18:50:39What Does Power BI Premium Mean for You?
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:
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).
https://prologika.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/logo.png00Prologika - Teo Lachevhttps://prologika.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/logo.pngPrologika - Teo Lachev2017-05-02 21:19:172017-05-02 21:19:17Power BI Report Measures Over Tabular Models
