Are premium per user accounts needed for viewers of a model?

[PowerWhy]

Hello,

My model is likely to need to be more than 1GB so I will need a premium per user account. Regarding sharing reports linked to that semantic model - would all of the users (they do not do power bi development) that view those reports all need to be upgraded from pro to premium per user, or can I leave them all on pro licences?

Many thanks!

PW

[v-mdharahman]

Hi @PowerWhy,
Thanks for reaching out to the Microsoft fabric community forum.

If the solution provided by @ibarrau is correct, then please accept it as Solution.

Also go through the following link to get a thorough idea of Licenses in Microsoft Power Bi.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/fundamentals/service-features-license-type

If this post helps then please mark it as a solution, so that other members find it more quickly.
If you have any other queries, feel free to reach out to community forum for assistance.

Thank you.

[ibarrau]

Hi. Yes. If you publish a semantic model in a premium per user workspace, then only users with premium per user will be able to view the report. The 1gb restriction makes you use the workspace as PPU to let you work with that size of data.

As an alternative you can reduce your data model with best practices or data values. There are many. Example: https://blog.ladataweb.com.ar/post/614108758904389632/datamodeling-5-tips-de-reducción-de-tamaño-de

I hope that helps,

[PowerWhy]

Thank you @ibarrau . How about if I have one PPU account and have a scheduled refresh on Service. Then I can periodically download the pbix file (can I do that still?) and share the pbix file on a shared drive? (the only disadvantage then being that user have the inconvenience of having to open in power bi desktop?). I assume with a large refresh (10 of millions of rows) it is likely that trying to refresh from power bi desktop is likely to time out?

[ibarrau]

Yes. You can. However I don't see the point of publishing to Service if you are going to download and share. You could just refresh the desktop file and share it without uploading and downloading again.

My recommendation would be checking downsizing practices for the semantic model. Creating something higher than 1gb is not that common. It's usually an issue with practices/modeling or a desire of checking years and years of data that woun't be used in daily or monthly analysis. If you downsize you could live with just pro.

If you have many users and high size model, you could think about powerbi embedded. This practice asks for a dedicated capacity license (like Fabric F4 300usd yearly reserved) and you could develop a custom web site (or pay a third party tool like pibi.cloud for this) that would let you share with any any any amount of users.

Regards