Forum Discussion
Power BI vs Data Warehouse
Community ChampionAs Phil has said, a Data Warehouse and Power BI are complementary. A Data Warehouse is a storage database, Power BI is a reporting database.
Anonymous wrote:
I agree, Power BI worked great with data warehouse, except perhaps for not being able to combine data from the DWH which you might quickly want to mash up with other data and drill through
I don't understand the point you are making here. Power BI is explicitly designed to get data from anywhere and mash it up - that's what it does.
- we still cant drill through to row detail [see records menu] held in SSAS Tabular from Power BI (which you can do if you import data into Power BI).
Yes you can. SSAS Tabular has an identical reporting engine underneath as Power BI. If you write the identical database in Power BI and SSAS Tabular you will get identical results. If you can't drill down to see the row level detail then it is related to your design, not SSAS Tabular
Additionally with direct query we can query underlying data in SQL Server and build a model in Power BI rather than needing to build the model in SSAS.
Direct Query does not have a data model in Power BI. You either connect to SQL Server, or SSAS and use the source to determine what you can see, or you build a model in Power BI - you can't do both at once.
At the moment it feels like Power BI development is outpacing SSAS Tabular which is making some SSAS Tabuar functionality redundant.
As I mentiond above, SSAS Tabular and Power BI use the same underlying reporting engine (Vertipaq/Power Pivot). There is very little development in this technology in either product. The development of Power BI is mainly in the area of data import (Power Query) and visualisations.
What is becoming redundant in SSAS Tabular?
Do we have a roadmap about how SSAS Tabular will be developed and integrated with Power BI, or will Power BI eventually replace SSAS Tabular?
SSAS Tabular is already integrated with Power BI. No Power BI will not replace SSAS Tabular. SSAS Tabular is only 1/3 of what Power BI is. Power BI has a reporting database (Power Pivot), an ETL tool (Power Query) and a visualisation/reporting tool (Power BI Visuals). SSAS Tabular is just the first one (effectively Power Pivot for Enterprise).
Advocate IIThank you for this thoughtful response. I'm more of a lay user of Power BI and understand some basic technical explanations. Can you simplify an answer for me? We connect to a tabular model and I'm noticing that we cannot use some of the new features, such as the new Quick Calc functions (i.e. % of row, % of column). Is this because we are connected to a tabular model? Is there any setting we can change to start utilizing these new features?
Thanks
- Phil_Seamark
Microsoft Employee
If you change your query mode to "Import data" rather than "direct query" you will have more functionality in Power BI.
Hi,
In my understanding when you do Direct Query, you literally send a query to your db (tabular in this case) when user access to the contents on Power BI, thus it is not possible you add any calculation further after db returns the data;
If you do Import for your datasets, you store the data you need in the in-memory DB in Power BI cloud which allows you to do the calculations you need for those data, as they are "in" your data model.
So to satisfy your need, simply build another workbook which uses import of your datasets.
Best Regards,
- Phil_Seamark
Although I suspect the ability to create Power BI custom measures on a direct query data source like SSAS tabular might not be too far away ;)
