Forum Discussion
Helper IPower BI Vs SSRS
I want to throw a couple ideas on here as well. Really SSRS is for your pixel perfect, operational reporting. Power BI is first and foremost an Analysis tool, it allows you to visualize your data in different ways in order to allow deeper understanding of your business.
The two tools really work together with SQL 2016, I encourage everyone to look into the new vision for BI going forward. SSRS reports in Power BI Service, Desktop files as backend for SSRS reports - looks really exciting.
Check out the Roadmap.
This is the best answser. Many professionals do not realize the diference between operational requirements and analytical requirements. Also the technology behind SSRS and Power BI are totally different and they are oriented to SSRS: Operational and PowerBI: Analytical.
SSRS is for Operational: Print an Invoice, Print an paginated list of detailed rows, get real time information from complex sql queries.
You cannot do the above with PowerBI. Instead PowerBI you can interact with slicers and filtering, and add summarized information to Tabular, Multidimensional or imported mode.
SSRS and Power BI has different sources:
Power BI as analytical model using uses Tabular, Power Pivot or Multidimensional , imported or Direct Query mede is oriented to get summarize data from measures.
In SSRS you can use the database directly as a source and generate an multitable joins with subqueries like you can do in SQL. It is efficient when you need to get 10,000 rows and 200 columns and with formulas.
Try to get 10,000 rows and 200 columns with Dax Measures comming from different tables and it simply does not run. Nothing bad with the tool, it is just not designed to do detailed massive reporting.