Datamart

[scee07]

Hi community, 

I read a few articles about the new Datamart and I frankly do not get what the breakthrough advantage is. 
If had the capability of doing SQL for providing views from my base tables or using stored procedures I'd see a big advantage as this would complement the architecture with computation capabilities in addition to DAX. My understanding that SQL is only for ad hoc queries and the advantage of datamarts that the entire data requirement for a domain is consolidated in the datamart.

So, obviously I am missing the point. So, the question is: what is the breakthrough advantage of datamarts? 

Best regards 

Christian

[Anonymous]

Hello,

I'm new with datamarts and I'm trying my first one but it give the following error:

The data is a group of files from a folder onpremise, it works as a normal query on desktop and I can upload it to a dataset on the service, but in the datamart doesn't works.  Someone can help me?  I already uncheck the "enable load" on every connection but the main one.

[scee07]

OK, thank you for the quick repsonses. I think, I have good enough picture now. 

[lbendlin]

My (limited) understanding is that it is an Azure SQL server by another name (and with opaque costs) that allows you to potentially circumvent your  (maybe) IT department's  limitations on setting up (on-premise or private cloud or Azure) SQL servers, and to subvert a (potential) company wide data governance/stewardship effort that may be based on a different process. What I find interesting is that Datamarts are suggested whenever I want to create a dataflow. I would think these two are rather different concepts.

[scee07]

Thank you for your answer.
I checked now if I can create something (table, view) in the SQL server database of a datamart via Azure Studio or SSMS. This does not work and is consistent with your explanation. So I would characterize it roughly as a "read only SQL database with a Power BI front end for reporting in a specific domain". Someone can correct me if this working definition is too narrow.
The MS documentation says:

Use datamarts when you need to:

• Sort, filter, do simple aggregation visually or through expressions defined in SQL
• For outputs that are results, sets, tables, and filtered tables of data
• Provide accessible data through a SQL endpoint
• Enable users who don’t have access to Power BI Desktop

Best regards 
Christian

[lbendlin · Accepted solution]

I was always intrigued (and appalled) by the concept of Direct Query access to Dataflows.  Maybe that is what Datamarts are. That would explain why that "Do you want to create a Datamart instead"  question keeps coming up.