What? Is that even a valid question?
At first glance this isn’t an obvious topic, but I’ve had a couple of conversations recently with partners that echoed some of my own thoughts about where and how Power BI Premium sits with Analysis Services.
Let’s recap what Power BI Premium brings in terms of performance enhancements (read about its wider capabilities here):
- Increased dataset limits
- Real time cache/pin to memory
- Secondary model copies
- Geo-replicas
- Incremental/Dedicated Refreshes
With the new support for very large data sets, incremental refreshes etc, this has led to the following question being asked:
“If I have Power BI Premium with all these enhancements, why would I need Analysis Services?”
To me, there’s one main reason above all others why you would use Analysis Services in conjunction with Power BI, and you can skip to the summary to see it, but in order to answer this, let’s first look at the two products in more detail:
Power BI
Until recently, we had Power BI Pro (or Free) and Analysis Services. Both had quite a clear, defined place in the BI ecosystem. Power BI is described as the following:
“…a suite of business analytics tools to analyze data and share insights”
These tools include Power BI Desktop (a powerful desktop data mashup and reporting tool), Power BI Mobile (mobile apps allowing you to access reports from anywhere) and the Power BI Service (allows you to publish and share reports throughout the organisation).
So, Power BI allows users to ingest data from a variety of sources, mash it up, build some reports and publish them to the Power BI Service for sharing and collaboration.
Power BI Premium is an add on to Power BI Pro that brings dedicated capacity, performance and scalability (see earlier in this article).
Analysis Services
With Analysis Services, you can mashup and combine data from multiple sources, define metrics, and secure your data in a single, trusted semantic data model.
Sound familiar?
In many ways, Power BI and Analysis Services are very similar. In fact, Power BI has at its heart a Tabular Analysis Services engine. When you ingest and mash up data into Power BI Desktop, you’re actually populating a local version of Analysis Services.
In fact with both tools you have very similar features:
- Create hierarchies
- Measures
- Calculated columns
- Row Level Security
- Live Connection/Direct Querying
Data Visualization and reporting aside (Power BI does this, Analysis Services doesn’t – it’s not a reporting tool) there are also differences, but the lines have become blurred in recent times.
The Main Difference
The key difference is that with a data model created in Power BI directly, it’s essentially a closed model to Power BI only. Users can create pages (reports) in Power BI Desktop with multiple visualizations and then publish this workbook to the Power BI Service. Within the Service itself, users can edit the published reports on this dataset as well as adding new ones:
Edit Report In Power BI Service
The point here is that this model and its data can be reused within and by Power BI only. Users must login to Power BI to edit the report, or they can publish a Power BI Desktop file as a central model and connect to it as a Power Service Live Connection. All of this functionality is pure Power BI.
Where Analysis Services differs is that it is essentially an open model. Yes, you create a data model by ingesting data and creating a user-friendly reporting model in exactly the same way you do with Power BI, but that’s where you stop. You publish the Analysis Services model as a central, trusted data source and – and this it the crux of the matter – ANY tool that can submit DAX or MDX can use your Analysis Services model and get exactly the same answer. This is the ultimate “single version of the truth” that is the goal of so many BI projects. You create your central model, publish it, then connect to it from any of the following tools, plus many more:
Summary
In the end, Power BI Premium on its own is a compelling option if you’re just a Power BI shop (and Excel, sort of) and nothing else. Your analysts and developers can develop Power BI models in Desktop, and these models can be used to create reports in the Service, or from Power BI Desktop using the Power BI Service Live Connection. My advice in this scenario is to start with Power BI as your data models, especially if your models are small or moderate in size, then consider moving to Analysis Services as a scaling up option. This is an especially appealing option now with the release of the Analysis Services Web Designer, which allows you to publish Power BI workbooks to Analysis Services and create a data model from them. This is an ideal scenario where you’re running a PoC and want to promote it to something more “enterprise”.
Scale Up Power BI to Analysis Services
However, if you want a central data model to act as the single version of the truth and have many different tools in use across the organization, then Analysis Services is your friend:
Power BI & Other Tools With Analysis Services
In conclusion, I recommend Analysis Services as a key component for any relational data warehouse platform in combination with Power BI. Whilst the decision isn’t as clear cut if you only use Power BI, the ability to create a completely abstracted, semantic layer that serves as your golden view of data regardless of what visualization tool is used is a point that can’t be over sold.
Agree? Disagree? Please feel free to comment below.
Related Links
Power BI Service Live Connection
