Power BI Premium already provides several additional capabilities beyond the ability to distribute content to read-only Power BI Free users. As described in Chapter 12, Administering Power BI for an Organization, organizations have full control over their provisioned resources and therefore, unlike provisioning on-premises hardware, can quickly and easily adjust the amount and allocation of premium resources. For example, with v-core pooling, an organization can choose to distribute the 32 v-cores of a P3 capacity SKU across two P1 capacities and a single P2 capacity (8 + 8 +16 = 32). Likewise, with single-click scale up, an organization could provision an additional 8 v-cores by purchasing a P1 SKU and then change an existing P1 capacity to a P2 capacity, which requires 16 v-cores. The details of the hardware of each premium capacity node (CPU, RAM, and bandwidth) and the limits imposed on using those nodes are included in the Premium capacity nodes section.
The following table describes 12 capabilities of Power BI Premium that are either currently available or have been identified by the Power BI team as a potential capability in the future:
Some of the capabilities identified in this table enable completely new scenarios for projects involving Power BI datasets created with Power BI Desktop. For example, up to a 10 GB dataset can be hosted in Premium capacity currently and much larger datasets will be supported in the future. Likewise, a dataset can be configured to refresh every 30 minutes in premium capacity and this frequency will also increase in the future. Incremental data refresh is expected to be delivered by mid-2018, and this will address a critical gap in the ability to leverage a large Power BI dataset. The following section, Corporate Power BI datasets, reviews the Single Dataset Across Workspaces (#7) limitation that may also support this deployment option.
The ability to publish SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) reports, also referred to as paginated reports or (.RDL reports), to the Power BI service will be especially valuable for organizations with significant SSRS investments. Without this capability, these organizations have needed to deploy the Power BI Report Server (or an SSRS server) as described in Chapter 10, Deploying the Power BI Report Server. Additionally, connectivity parity with Analysis Services will allow organizations to utilize familiar development and management tools such as Visual Studio and SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) to apply life cycle management processes to Power BI datasets as they would with Analysis Services models. Moreover, connectivity parity with Analysis Services will allow organizations to leverage other common data visualization and BI tools such as Tableau. For example, both Power BI and Tableau reports could be built against a Power BI dataset provided the dataset is assigned to a workspace in premium capacity.
To support the largest Power BI deployments, a scale-out option involving read-only replicas with load balancing and dedicated data refresh nodes is mentioned in the roadmap section of the Power BI Premium October 2017 whitepaper. This document and other Power BI whitepapers can be accessed at the following URL http://bit.ly/2Hu57DK.