Forum Discussion
does Power BI need integration?
I have been tasked with enabling CI/CD for our Power BI environment. However, I'm confused by the task (at least on the CI side). Integration solutions (e.g., CI, feature branching, etc.) are only needed when 2+ developers are working on the same code base. However, at least in my experience, this doesn't occur for BI report development. That is, the "code base" for every report is independent, and only 1 developer is working on a report at any given time. So, this leaves me wondering, is it common to only have 1 developer working on a report at any given time? In other words, is CI (or, any other integration solution for that matter) even necessary for BI report development?
4 Replies
Anonymous , there are some third party tools like ALM toolkit, which can help
How to ALM toolkit to merge Power BI files/Meta: https://youtu.be/lio62VRkOnc
If those do not work, it would be really difficult
My question isn't whether there are tools to support this. My question is "does CI even make sense for PBI (or any BI report) development?"
Hi Anonymous ,
The Power BI deployment pipelines tool enables BI teams to build an efficient and reusable release process for their Power BI content. To achieve continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) of content, many organizations use various automation tools, including Azure DevOps.
In software development, we use a continuous integration process that helps us automate the merging of artifacts, the use of one code base for all of us, and continuous delivery to automate the deployment of our solutions. That makes sense to enable CI/CD for our Power BI environment.
For more details，you can refer to：
Automate your deployment pipeline using APIs and Azure DevOps
PowerBI - CICD using Azure DevOps
Versioning and CI/CD for Power BI with Azure DevOps
Power BI CI/CD with DevOps YAML Pipelines
YouTube Video: Power BI Continuous Integration/Continuous Development with Azure DevOps with Luca Gualtieri
Hope it helps,
Community Support Team _ CaitlynIf this post helps then please consider Accept it as the solution to help the other members find it more quickly.
Anonymous
Perhaps I'm being unclear. My question isn't about the availability of tools. My question is about CI even being needed for BI report development at all. What I want to know is... What does it mean to integrate Power BI artifacts? CI is about integrating each developer's work so that there is always just one version of truth (to avoid "merge hell"). But, at least in my experience, only one developer ever works on a Power BI report at a time. So, there is no need to integrate his / her work with any other developer's work. Is this not normal? And, doesn't this mean that we don't need CI for BI report development?
