operational reporting in Power BI

[mr_wizard]

I have read many statements that Power BI is made for analytical reporting, not operational reporting.  That is, Power BI expects the use of a star schema data model and measures (sliced by dimensions / fields).  Power BI is not made for operational reporting, i.e., we munge data into a single table (denormalized) data model with no measures and create a table visual using all fields from this table.  Is this true?  If so, what is a better tool for operational reporting?

[Anonymous]

Hi @mr_wizard ，

I am not sure what kind of functionality you need to implement with Power BI. But the point I need to make with you is that creating measures is not necessary (sometimes some aggregation functions are available to perform the corresponding calculations) as shown in the following figure. It depends on what kind of data you need to present...

Power BI is a suite of business analytics tools that help you gain insights from your data. It allows you to connect to various data sources, create interactive visualizations, and share reports with others. Power BI consists of Power BI Desktop, a Windows application for creating reports, and Power BI Service, a cloud-based platform for sharing and collaborating on reports. It is primarily used for analytical reporting, helping users visualize and analyze data to make informed decisions.While it can be used for some operational reporting tasks, its main focus is on providing insights and trends from the data.

What is Power BI? - Power BI | Microsoft Learn

What is Power BI?: Services, Architecture, and Dashboard [Updated] | Simplilearn

Best Regards

[mr_wizard]

@Anonymous I know that you don't need to create explicit measures in Power BI.  (However, I do believe that implicit measures is a bad practice.)  But, that isn't my question.  My question is...  Given that Power BI is primarily intended for analytical reporting, is there an MS tool primarily intended for operational reporting?  If it matters, at my organization, operational reporting for us is where we write a SQL query over some OLTP data source (usually involving lots of joins) and return a single result set (table visual).