Use PowerBI or SSAS for measures and Calculated columns?

[ICRdatalover]

Hi everyone, 

I know it could be an old topic, I read a bit about this, but its a 2015 conversation and I was wondering if there are any changes.

Im struggling to understand what are the main differences between the creation of measures / calc.columns in PowerBI and SSAS. I mean, I know SSAS have partitions or perspectives but are there any other important considerations that am I forgetting? I read a lot about but couldnt find any specific in terms of performance.

So the questions are:

1. If I create every measure or calculated columns for my power bi report in SSAS it will be pre-processed and potentially better in terms of performance?

2. I would like to create a Tabular cube and I try to understand if I should use SSAS or PowerBI to create the tabular model.

Thank you in advance, any light on this would be really apreciate it.

Kind regards.

ICR

[v-lid-msft]

Hi @ICRdatalover ,

In my opinion, it can improve performance at most time, For example, the data source and your SSAS server is on-premises, if the dataset is very large and you are connect data source directly by Import Mode, it may take long time to import data into power bi service and generate calculated columns when refreshing dataset. But if you are connecting SSAS by Live Connect Mode, Only the necessary data will be tranport into power bi service to make the report. This may increase the workload of the machine running the SSAS.

Best regards,

[ICRdatalover]

Hi @v-lid-msft 

Thank you for your answer.

I think I didnt express myself properly,  what I like to know if its better in terms of performance create a tabular model through SSAS and conect it to Power BI, using it mostly for visualization or create all the semantic layout in PowerBI, model, relationships, roles, measures, calc.cloumns etc, conect it to the DWH straight away without SSAS.

So is there anything in SSAS-Tabular mode that I can not perform with PowerBI-PowerQuery apart from what I said before?

Thank you in advance.!

[rcanuta]

Hello there,

I have the exact same question.

@ICRdatalover did you find some additional information since this thread started?

Many thanks!