Azure Synapse Analytics for a non-DBA

[DarinSpence]

I work with Power BI and Excel. The problem is that Client data is siloed across many sources. I find myself piecemealing data together using Power Query to build models, but revisiting those models later or refreshing them can be messy.

Do you think Azure Synapse Analytics something that a Power BI Developer could learn to use well enough to create a simple data warehouse for a client, or should we leave data warehouses to the professionals?

[DarinSpence]

So, perhaps have each client get a Power BI Premium per User account. I had not considered that. 

[smpa01]

If you have premium workspace, you can take advantage of datamart. You can bring all data from different sources to the datamart and then set up refresh (incremental too) , define role and many other things. The advantage is, each tbl within datamart gets automatically attached to an Azure SQL DB and you can take advantage of SQL to do crazy things from that point onwards. Altenatively, the datamrt itself is a SSAS db, and you can write fully qualified SSAS query too, if you like.

If datamart is not switched on (org level) for some reason, you can utilize dataflow ( which is less awesome than datamart in terms of crazy utilities comes with datamart) but you can set up refresh/incremental refresh.

In short, if you want to be the DBA (to a lesser extent of a fully qualified DBA) and Analyst you can be one.

Take datamart and dataflow on a test drive to know what awaits for you.

If you dont have premium workspace, your options are limited