On Prem Tabular... what's allowed?

[Anonymous]

Say I have an on-prem tabular server.  It will be used to serve excel reports (hosted on sharepoint) and dashboards in power bi.   All from a single model, that's hot!

Question:  what exactly will my experience be in Power BI?

By default, I am sorta assuming I will have a live connection (do I still call that DirectQuery?) -- and I will not be adding any new measures (etc) in Power BI.  It's just... a report builder.

But I get the feeling I can also... do some freaky import into Power BI... still re-use my existing measures (from tabular) and add new measures in Power BI?   Is that... good or bad? 🙂

(Would go try it, but the Tabular server isn't up yet... suppose I could try out the new Azure SSAS!)

Thanks for infos!

[v-yuezhe-msft · Accepted solution]

Hi @Anonymous,

Based on your description, you refer to that connecting to on-premises SSAS tabular model from Power BI Desktop, right?

If that is the case, choosing which connection type(Live connection or Import) depends on your requirements, you can make a decision after checking the following points about the two connection type.

    a. “Live Connection” is more appropriate when you work with much large model solution and you need to directly access an tabular model. It offers the most secure and robust method for building and maintaining a Power BI solution. However, if you created a live connection , all of the query and modeling features in Power BI Desktop are disabled, and you can’t create new measures, also you are not able to connect to another type of data source in the same Power BI Desktop file. Live Connection requires Enterprise level SQL (up until SQL 2016).

    b. With import connection, you are able to use Power BI Desktop’s advanced Query Editor to further shape data, and you can use Power BI Desktop’s modeling features to further model the data. Of course, you are OK to create new measures. However, it could take a while to load or refresh larger data sets, or data sets that have been heavily manipulated. Also in this scenario, when you publish Power BI Desktop file(PBIX file) to Power BI Service, it has a 1GB limit to the PBIX file.

Reference:
Analysis Services Tabular data in Power BI Desktop
Power BI Connection Types

Thanks,
Lydia Zhang

[Anonymous]

Perfect!  Thanks @v-yuezhe-msft.