topic Re: Migrating .rdl libraries to Power BI Service in Report Server

Migrating .rdl libraries to Power BI Service

BM4291 — Fri, 09 Aug 2019 14:42:16 GMT

Hi,

As an organisation, we're currently looking at updating our core business application which will in turn provide opportunities to upgrade our reporting infrastructure.

Presently, we've rolled out PowerBI and have made several reports and dashboards available to end users. We still however have our legacy Reporting Server site which houses 2-300+ .rdl files built against 2008 R2.

When our business application is upgraded, we will be moving our reporting from an on-premise SQL Server hosted in Azure to an Azure Data Factory (PaaS) to service our reporting. In the interim, we will still need access to the legacy reports whilst we decide what to migrate to our PowerBI model and what can be discarded.

Realistically, how feasible would it be to migrate our reports from Report Server to the PBI Service?

My current thinking is that we would do the below in PowerShell but I'm not 100% all of it would be feasible; has anyone else got a similar experience or any advice on this?

Loop each .rdl and update its XML to include new definitions as part of PBI Paginated.
- I've done the reverse but as a one off job i.e. removing the elements that aren't recognised by 2008 and renaming the report definition.
Update Connection String to point at our new environment
Save a copy of each report (so not to break the current ones)
Upload each file to PowerBI Service

Unfortunately, the business need is that we keep these older reports which will naturally be less efficient but the plan will be to whittle away any that aren't relevant pre-migration. I want to have this process as automated as possible, namely in that I don't want to be manually dragging 2-300 files across myself!

Also, if we suddenly dump these files to the PBI server, will this also have an impact on our premium capacity usage? My gut feeling is that it will and may mean we need to upgrade (currently on P1).

Any thoughts? Any similar experiences?

Re: Migrating .rdl libraries to Power BI Service

rpatkar — Fri, 09 Aug 2019 21:44:27 GMT

hi,

Migrating reports from Report Server to PBI Service is certainly possible. We have plans to provide a migration tool to do this but it is not ready yet.

Uploading all reports to single workspace bound to premium capacity should not overload the capacity. Resource usage is primarily a function of render request frequency and complexity. Please note that if your capacity is from before May 2019 then you will need to manually enable Paginated Reports workload through Power BI's Admin portal.

Thanks,

Rohit

Re: Migrating .rdl libraries to Power BI Service

Anonymous — Fri, 09 Aug 2019 22:03:57 GMT

Hi BM4291,

I sent you a private message to better understand the scenario. To the last part of the question on if this would affect your premium capacity usage; you can choose the amount of memory used by the paginated reports workload, so if you don't expect a lot of concurrent usage you can set that at a lower value. But it will use/share the resources with the other workloads.

thanks

-Boreki

Re: Migrating .rdl libraries to Power BI Service

BM4291 — Mon, 12 Aug 2019 08:32:24 GMT

Thanks Anonymous , I've got back to your private message.