Notes from Rachel
EES License 8 cores; 5400/year MSRP; Dustin 4-8 cores are what we need
Memory is the important spec: minimum of 200% of data model
- On premises or cloud?
- Only Power BI Service (cloud) allows for creation of (multiple data sources) dashboards (comparison of reports & dashboards)
- Power BI Service requires setup of Enterprise On Premises Data Gateway
- Power BI Query Editor Import; data limits exist: 1 GB (more than 10 times compression); this we should use for ad hoc analyses, but not for enterprise reports or visualizations
- Power BI Report Server:
- Direct Query: no data lives in Power BI; it lives in SQL Server
- Analysis Services (Part of SQL Server licensing): hold Power BI data models; in-memory processing. Visual Studio or SQL Server Data Tools
- Better performance than Direct Query
- Same format as Power BI—this is the performance gain
- We should use this
- Power BI Premium
- How many cores? (Back-end & front-end)
- Pro Accounts needed for editors
- How many?
- EM or P SKU?
- Only P does on-prem
- EM SKUs embed reports in portals & LOB applications
- Cannot downgrade from a P to an EM (but can scale up or down within P or EM)
- Data Sources
- Import data into Power BI from data files or databases
- SQL Server DirectQuery
- Production Databases DirectQuery
- DAX Complexity (as well as network and row-level security) greatly impact performance in DirectQuery mode
- Access Models
- Role-Based Security via some data sources (asked for list)
- Some data sources do not re-authenticate, and will display ALL information to all users who have access to the report/dashboard, regardless of any role-based security that exists for those users who have access to the report/dashboard
Notes from Corina
Reference materials: Microsoft Power BI Premium Whitepapers
Answered questions:
- What is our on-premises solution? Does it include Premium?
- We are using Power BI Report Server and deploying only on-premises.
- Use on premises sql server. Licensing covers Enterprise Premium... sorta. Still need individual licenses for people who need to access large datasets.
- We will not need the data gateway since we are on-premises.
- Working with datasets:
- Direct query scenario: actively query SQL database
- Is "incremental refresh" available? Partition and incrementally refresh.
- Where is the capacity bottleneck? At Power BI. Still 1G.
- What do we need to know about refreshing data sources when we create new sources for existing reports?
- Keeping the column names the same will help, but changing the table structure will cause issues. Probably need to discuss this more with implementation partner as we progress.
- How to export reports for print to include information not visible?
- Paginated SSRS reporting services reports.
- Paginated SSRS reporting services reports.
New Questions
- Is view only access allowed into workspaces or do reports for viewers need to be published elsewhere?
- Once we are tied to an established data source, will it still be possible to import data into the query viewer to add it to the mix? Thinking specifically about adding data from other databases to combine with MaineStreet data.