Forum Discussion

Yted's avatar
Yted
Frequent Visitor
9 years ago

SSAS Tabular Model or Power BI Model

I am trying to get some information on whether you should be building the data model in Power BI or develop it in SSDT for deployment to SSAS Tabular server. What are the pros / cons for each? How do...
BhaveshPatel's avatar
BhaveshPatel
Super User
9 years ago

They are both running on the same Vertipaq Engine. SSAS is more suitable for the Corporate BI development and PowerBI  is product more suitable for self service bi deployments. However, the underlying technology is similar other than SSAS tabular is more rich in number of features such as enhanced partiiton and RLS features. more configurable.

 

However, PowerBI models are transferrable to SQL server 2016. It means you can develop your model in powerbi or powerpivot and later on can import in SSAS Tabular. 

 

Complete BI Life Cycle  and Microsoft is filling the gaps in these products to make the more and more beautiful.

 

I Love it!

  • Anonymous's avatar
    Anonymous
    Not applicable
    4 years ago

    BhaveshPatel  Good points. I would like to comment on your last sentence "Complete BI life cycle and Microsoft is filling the gaps..."

     

    The CI/CD story is far from complete in Power BI. The reasons are as follows:

     

    1. Power BI templates PBIT are binary files.
    2. You want to use GIT for storing your PBIT files and then a CI/CD to publish the PBIT to PBIX into the desired workspace. The binary nature of PBIT makes this very difficult. (A 3rd party solution like ALM toolkit can be used, but nevertheless the developer experience is poor)
    3. If I have a moderately complex data model (10-20 tables) and we are team of 2-3 develops, then there is no way to do a Pull Request review OR even a effect GIT version comparison.

    Microsoft must open up the format of PBIT. 

    Microsoft must make it possible to publish a PBIT to a Workspace (via REST).

     

    Let me know if you disagree. Happy to learn.

    Thanks