Forum Discussion
Measures and CalcColumns in Power BI vs Tabular model (replace SSAS with Power BI?)
You need Analysis Services if you have one of the following requirements:
- You need to have row level security
- Your data set is greater than 250MB
- You need to have a fine grained control over how your model is refreshed from the source data (partitioning)
If the aforementioned requirements are not present, then using Power Pivot or Power BI Desktop to build your model and publish it to Power BI is a valid and wonderful choice.
Hi Eno1978,
I think you misunderstood my question.
What I am trying to find out is if I can simply replace the SSAS tabular model by creating measures, calculated columns and relationships in Power BI instead -- thus making SSAS irrelevant.
Bottom line: If I could replace SSAS with a cloud-only feature, I would.
pmdci, SSAS is actually part of Power BI Desktop and Excel Power Pivot. When Microsoft incorporated SSAS into the Desktop and Power Pivot, several enterprise features were made unavailable (security, partitioning, etc) but from the pure modeling perspective, you have pretty much the same features in SSAS and Desktop/Power Pivot.
I think that not having a clound only SSAS like product, or Platform as a Service (PaaS) Analysis Services (similar to SQL Azure) is a big miss for MIcrosoft and I hope that it gets addressed soon.