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rmcvicar
Helper I
Helper I

how to use the PBI Development Pipeline: Dev, test & Prod?

how can a company (or user) start using the PBI Development Pipeline?  Can a Pro User use this environment or Do they need to be a Premium User or do you need a Premium (company) licensing?

 

We have about 80 report developed throughn PBI Desktop but published online for our PBI users (Office 365 E5 users) to consume through their browsers.  But want get a more formal development environment which currently Desktop to PBI Service (Published).  Copied of Desktop files are kept in SharePoint folders with archive. SQL datasets are SQL scripts backed up through VSCode with Git.  Does not the development pipeline allow a single platform for dev, text and production with versioning?

4 REPLIES 4
rmcvicar
Helper I
Helper I

So we have one person Power BI Pro user who does all our report development and publishing; and this publishing is to approximately four Workspaces.  If we upgrade that one user (our developer from Pro to Premium) so they can start moving our reports (80 plus) to the new PBI Development Pipeline: Dev, test & Prod model; Questions:

how does this affect all our report consumers users (these users are for the most part Power BI Pro (as we license users at Office 365 E5 which includes Power BI Pro)?

The user would start to consume reports from the new Production environment: Then we would not need to upgrade the whole organization to the Power BI Premium license yet.   We have about 45 Power BI Pro users.

Hi @rmcvicar 

If you go for PPU you'll be best to upgrade all your user licences to PPU. Because only a PPU licence can access Reports on a PPU workspace, and in order to use Pipelines you need to have a PPU licence (or better). You can get an addon licence for PPU for your E5 accounts and existing Pro licences.

However, do read up on Pipelines before you go ahead.

Pipelines are mainly for Dataset versioning, having Dev, Test and Prod Datasets and moving between then can be very useful, but you've not highlighted that as a requirement. Pipelines don't do PBIX version management , the best advice is to use OneDrive, effectively Sharepoint versioning, which you seem to have already. 

If you are a smaller organisation you might be better using your Pro licences, and building Power BI Apps. This gives a simple stageing mechanism. Reports are published to a Workspace (that users don't have access to) and built into an App (Which is shared with users). Developers can then work on the Reports, and test them etc. without updating the App. When the development team is ready they can update the App and AppV1 is replaced by AppV2 for the users and so on. It's not perfect, but it works well for a small development team. You may also want to look at the free Power BI version control system developed by the people at PowerBITips.

Power BI Version Control - Ready to use solution and free download

Again this may just improve version control over the basics.

I'm not saying don't go PPU, but be aware that it means PPU for everyone in the organisation, and you may be able to wring some productivity out of the Pro licences.

Hope this helps

Stuart

Thank you.  I clearly did not understand the PPU liceinsing for pipeline services.  In as they are only for datasets; as you point out this may not be a fit at this time.  I am already using the SharePoint / OneDrive for versioning; and deploy across Dev / Test; and Production Workspaces.  I keep my datasets in SQL (SQL Views) and use Visual Studio (SSI add) to code archive; and then use Visual Studio Code with Git to make an online repository.  I'll checkout PowerBITips.  Just keep looking for a all-in-one tool for everything.

 

Again TY

v-henryk-mstf
Community Support
Community Support

Hi @rmcvicar ,

 

The following conditions need to be met to deploy the pipeline

  1. You have one of the following Premium licenses:
    • ou're a Power BI Pro user, and you belong to an organization that has Premium capacity.
    • Premium Per User (PPU).
  2. You're an admin of a new workspace experience.

 

Deployment is divided into three phases, which can be understood as each phase is a small platform.

Best practices for deploying pipelines can be found in the following document, which has recommendations for databases:  It's better not to overload it with queries generated by BI creators for their development or test datasets. Build separate databases for development and testing. This helps protect production data, and doesn't overload the development database with the entire volume of production data, which can slow down things.

 

check the document link: Deployment pipelines best practices


If the problem is still not resolved, please provide detailed error information and let me know immediately. Looking forward to your reply.


Best Regards,
Henry


If this post helps, then please consider Accept it as the solution to help the other members find it more quickly.

 

 

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