For many organizations, the deployment of Power BI entails the reporting and self-service needs of hundreds or even thousands of users, as well as massive datasets. Power BI Premium and Analysis Services are positioned to address these needs via workload-based pricing, flexible scale-up and scale-out options, and enterprise-grade semantic modeling features. Although organizations and certain projects may start out with Power BI Desktop and shared capacity in the Power BI service, the utilization of Power BI Premium capacity and optionally the migration to Analysis Services is often essential to deliver the scale, return on investment (ROI), and administrative controls of an enterprise BI platform.
This chapter begins with a review of the capabilities enabled by Power BI Premium capacities and the top considerations in provisioning this capacity. In addition to premium capacities, Azure Analysis Services (AAS) and SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) are introduced as enterprise BI modeling tools with features that address limitations with Power BI Desktop. Finally, the steps and considerations in the migration of a Power BI Desktop file to an Analysis Services model are described.
In this chapter, we will review the following topics:
- Power BI Premium
- Power BI Premium provisioning factors
- Power BI Premium capacity allocation
- Analysis Services versus Power BI datasets
- Azure Analysis Services and SQL Server Analysis Services
- Migration from Power BI dataset to Analysis Services model