Power BI FAQ

Collectively, Power BI refers to Microsoft’s platform for data visualization and analytics. In its current form Power BI has existed since 2015, when it became available. Prior to that, some of the technology underpinning today’s core Power BI functionalities was available in Power Pivot and Power Query in Excel.

Power BI has a few types of services presented I the next sections.

The Power BI Desktop application is a companion product to the Power BI Service. This is a desktop app that is standalone, freely available, and with no licensing requirements. Users can connect to data sources and create reports but are not able to share their reports without a license. A comprehensive guide on getting started with the Power BI Desktop app is available here.

The Power BI service is a cloud platform for publishing, sharing, and collaborating on data products and visualizations. The service is available at app.powerbi.com. You need a Power BI Pro or Premium Per User (PPU) license to create content online, with the option to sign up for a free trial to test the service out. The typical Power BI development flow involves connecting to a data source and designing a report using Power BI Desktop, then publishing the report and configuring its settings in the Power BI Service.

Power BI Report Builder is a standalone Windows application that enables users to create paginated reports. Paginated reports are printer friendly, multi-page reports typically designed around a table visual. Report developers can preview data locally, then publish their paginated report to the Power BI service. Paginated reports are highly formatted and designed to be exported to PDF or Excel formats or distributed in hard copy. Power BI Report Builder is very similar to the Microsoft Report Builder designed to publish paginated reports to SSRS.

Power BI Report Server is an on-premises or Azure VM deployed report server with a web portal where you display and manage reports and KPIs. Along with it come the tools to create Power BI reports, paginated reports, mobile reports, and KPIs. Unlike the Power BI Service, you cannot use the Report Server to develop reports in the browser. A full comparison table between Report Server and the Power BI Service is available here.

Power BI Mobile is the mobile companion app for Android and iOS designed to bring your live reports to any mobile device. At design time, Power BI Desktop and the Power BI service offer the option to switch to mobile layout and adjust the properties of your reports in a way that fits the constrained proportions of cellular devices. Then, users consume those mobile-friendly reports through either a browser or the mobile app.

Power BI embedded analytics allows embedding Power BI items such as reports, dashboards, and tiles, in a web application or in a website. Power BI Embedded is a PaaS analytics solution, hosted in Azure, and designed to be integrated into your own applications, be it a static website or line-of-business application. Power BI Embedded is a powerful option to expose data to third parties or enable actionable data insights.

To connect to a data source from either Power BI Desktop or the Power BI Service, developers use one of the many Power Query data source connectors. Power Query supports connecting to flat files, a variety of databases, cloud storage services, API-exposed business applications, Databricks, and others. Power Query supports three connection modes for Power BI.

Power Query in Power BI supports three connection modes: Import, for bringing data into the Power BI engine for transformations and modeling. Direct Query for frequently changing, high-volume and pre-modeled data. Live Connection for data hosted in SQL Server Analysis Service.

Generally, Import mode supports all data sources. Direct Query mostly supports SQL Server, other database sources, as well as semantic models. Finally, Live Connection is specifically intended for Azure Analysis Services and SSAS. This article provides a thorough overview of Direct Query vs Import Mode, while this blog post provides a full comparison of all connection modes.

Yes, data professionals can utilize Power BI for showing data in soft real time. There are two primary mechanisms for using Power BI for real-time data.

The first approach is utilizing a streaming dataset or a push dataset. Developers can set either type of dataset up from the Power BI Service. The second approach is connecting to a database using Direct Query Mode and combining that with a suitable Live Page Refresh setting. With Live Page Refresh, the visuals on the page can issue the respective queries up to one time every second or be updated upon change detection. Availability of these options is subject to admin settings.

The short answer is “Yes,” however, Power BI is not a data transformation tool per se. Power BI Desktop comes bundled with the Power Query engine and the Power Query editor, as well as several data modelling capabilities. These functionalities allow data developers to ingest data from a variety of data sources, then shape, transform and eventually model these data. Therefore, Power Query is the data transformation and data preparation engine in Power BI. Power Query comes with a graphical interface for getting data from sources and a Power Query editor for applying transformations. The Model View in Power BI Desktop provides the capability to define relationships between the different tables in your dataset.

Navigating the various Power BI service limitations can be a complex task and depends on the license available. Two notable limitations are the 1GB model size limit and eight times a day maximum refresh frequency for the Power BI Pro License. A full list of limits is available here.

In Power BI data developers can utilize Data Analytics Expression, or DAX for short. This is a formula language, specific to Power BI, as well Analysis Services and Power Pivot. With DAX, developers create measures that use the underlying data, perform calculations, and output the result depending on context. DAX provides numerous built-in functions and supports variable creation.

You can use Python or R to write custom scripts to import data or create custom visuals. This functionality is subject to initial configuration on the host machine as well as Power BI desktop. Publishing reports with custom scripts is additionally subject to limitations such as data set size and the supported libraries that a developer can use.

Data consumers frequently use the words “report” and “dashboard” interchangeably in daily talk. However, in Power BI terms, a report and a dashboard are two different artefacts. A report is multi-page view of the underlying data model with various visuals, slicers, and metrics. On the other hand, a dashboard is a single-page canvas providing a collection of the most important metrics at a glance. The different visuals, called tiles, may come from more than one report. While data developers create reports using Power BI Desktop or the Power BI Service, creating dashboards is reserved for the Power BI Service only.

Power BI in all variations is a data reporting, analytics, and visualization tool, whereas MS Fabric is an integrated, unified data platform, built around the OneLake concept. Power BI is intended to consume data from various workspaces and data sources on OneLake from MS Fabric or elsewhere. A detailed comparison between the two is available here: MS Fabric vs Power BI.

The Power BI licensing model covers different use cases, data volumes, and platforms.

First, you can download and experiment with Power BI Desktop, which does not require any specific license. If you want to publish your report, you will need at least a Power BI Free license, however, that grants access to your personal Workspace in Power BI service only, with no sharing and collaboration functionalities.

Moving up the stack, we have Power BI Pro, which grants unlimited creating, viewing, sharing and consumption of reports and dashboards. This Pro license is available as either a standalone SKU or as part of Microsoft 365 E5 license.

Then there is the Premium per User (PPU) license, providing organizations with the flexibility to license Premium features on a per-user basis. It includes all features available with Power BI Pro, plus advanced AI, self-service prep for big data, simplified data management, and more.

Additionally, core and advanced Power BI features are available via MS Fabric capacity licensing, which supersedes the Premium Capacity licensing. Finally, teams can buy Power BI embedded license individually by capacity. A full licensing guide is available here.

You can use this document for a detailed guide on getting started learning Power BI. Alternatively, you can use the MSSQLTips.com search. Also, check out this Power BI online learning series.