Forum Discussion
Using SSRS today, SSAS or Power BI tomorrow?
Anonymous
Many thanks for your quick and good anwers!
So I guess Power BI is the option to go with.
But how is the data model created when I'm implementing Power BI directly with SQL Server?
If I'd connect Power BI with SSRS I guess the reports are still stuck to only show the reports created in SSRS, but with a better interface?
I've searched for a better understanding of this but almost everything I find is regarding how to use Power BI...
kabro I'll take a high level response here to hopfully clarify a couple things. There are a couple things that I'll recommend.
Starting with ad-hoc, which can be used to create a proof of concept, and moving to a larger company wide solution if you need to expand further. All of this is premised on the fact that you do, or will need to structure a data model. (look this concept up if you are unfamiliar)
ad-hoc: Power BI lets you take any data from various sources and using Power BI desktop, you can create a model in the tool to create relationships to each of your imported objects. You also have the ability to directly connect to sources, but as Bjoern explains, there are caveats to each connection type - you can look them up in the support site.
Corporate: What I would recommend you look into is Tabular models (this is essentially the same thing being used in Power BI). Power BI, then has the ability to direct connect to the tabular model you build. This solution required SQL BI edition or Enterprise.
(You could also go the Multidimensional route, but if you don't know either - tabular models are easier to understand initially and fit most needs)
Tabular models will allow you to write procedures to pull in data, and will also pull in off views and tables. Long term, it sounds like you want to look at denormalizing the relevant business info you need and creating a data-mart or warehouse to extract the relevant information into a Tabular model or Power BI.