Power BI VS SSAS Tabular Models -> Golden Version of the Truth?

[okusai3000]

Hi everyone,

Since a couple of years, at our company, we have moved from a couple of Power BI pbix, to a full Datawarehouse in a Azure MySQL DB, using tools as SSIS and SSAS, and finally Power BI only as a design an reader enviroment.

This approach allowed us, what in my opinion, is the main idea of the Business Intelligence: to have a golden version of the truth, doing the measures only once, and NOT allowing anyone to build their on numbers. For instance, we have defined what we consider as Number of Active Patients, and this single number could have not being achieved, if every time, we had to build that measure again and again in separate reports.

So here we are, where everyone in Youtube, forums, and Power Bi developers, talk as if Power BI is enough for a company, and honestly I cannot see it. I mean, I don't get how a medium-big size company can have multiple PBIX, with their own models, and measures, in a way that you cannot centralize which is the right number.

In other words, this point of view makes me think Power BI as a nice Excel Sheet, which is exactly what we want to avoid!

I don't know if I have been clear enough, but I would love to hear your opinions about this topic, as I think about this everyday at work, and no one seems to find an answer.

Thanks a lot.

[v-yalanwu-msft]

Hi, @okusai3000 ;

 Power BI Desktop is essentially a cut down version of SSAS Tabular.  So if you build a model in PBI Desktop, it's pretty easy to port to SSAS if need (and vice versa).

I'd say if your data volumes are small to medium and it's not too complex then there would me more advantages in using PBI over SSAS. However when the data model becomes more complex then it starts to favour SSAS.  

In saying that, an efficient Power BI Desktop model can import many billions of rows and perform well - and it's cheaper than buying an SSAS seat (on premise or Azure).

Why use SSAS Tabular when we have Power BI? - Kohera

Difference Between SSAS and Power BI (microsoft.com)

Best Regards,
Community Support Team _ Yalan Wu
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