Building Enterprise BI with Power BI Premium

For many organizations, the deployment of Power BI entails surfacing mission-critical KPIs over vast sets of data as well as empowering business users as part of a data culture. Power BI Premium is designed to meet these needs via a workload-based pricing model and scalable, enterprise-grade semantic modeling and reporting features.

While Power BI projects may begin as a proof-of-concept or as a self-service solution developed by a business analyst, the features exclusive to Power BI Premium capacity, such as large datasets, paginated reports, and the XMLA endpoint are often necessary to meet performance, scalability, and application life cycle needs of enterprise solutions.

Power BI Premium represents Microsoft’s flagship business intelligence suite, including a superset of Analysis Services semantic modeling features, a paginated reporting service offering the pixel-perfect enterprise reporting features of Reporting Services...

Power BI Premium

Power BI Premium consists of dedicated capacity (hardware) that an organization can provision to host some or all of its Power BI content (datasets, reports, scorecards, and dashboards). As an alternative to the free clusters of capacity provided by Microsoft and shared by many organizations, Premium capacities are isolated to a specific organization and thus are not impacted by the use of Power BI by other organizations.

As flexible platform and software as a service (SaaS) architectures become the norm, organizations increasingly value the ability to focus their efforts on building the right solutions for their stakeholders with the appropriate amount of resources and with minimal to no infrastructure maintenance. Power BI Premium capacity aligns well with these new expectations as it enables an organization to provision and deploy enterprise-scale resources it requires in seconds and avoids the need to configure or maintain the underlying hardware

With...

Premium capacity nodes

A Premium capacity node can be thought of as a fully managed server in the Azure cloud that runs the Power BI service, including all frontend and backend operations such as loading a report and refreshing a dataset, respectively. The capacity node is dedicated and isolated to the organization that provisioned the capacity, and the same user experience and functionality are delivered as the shared (free) capacity provided by the Power BI Service.

Each capacity node has a set of processing and memory resources (v-cores and RAM), bandwidth limits, and a cost that aligns with these resources. For example, a P1 capacity node includes 8 v-cores and 25 GB of RAM at a cost of $4,995 per month, while a P2 capacity includes 16 v-cores and 50 GB of RAM at a cost of $9,995 per month.

When workspaces containing Power BI content (datasets, reports, and dashboards) are assigned to Premium capacity nodes, the resources of the given capacity node are used to execute...

Premium capacity estimations

The volume of factors involved in Premium capacity utilization makes it difficult to forecast the amount of Premium capacity (and thus cost) required. This complexity is particularly acute for large deployments with diverse use cases to support.

Additionally, for organizations relatively new to Power BI, the level and growth of user adoption, as well as the requirements for future projects, can be unclear. In the past, Microsoft provided an online tool to estimate which capacities would be needed for estimated workloads. However, that online tool no longer exists. Instead, use the guidance in this section to estimate Premium capacity requirements and then use the Monitoring Premium capacities section later in this chapter to determine whether additional resources are necessary.

Recall from the previous section that the important capacity limits from Table 15.2 vary per dataset storage mode and usage. Available RAM is highly important to import...

Premium capacity administration and allocation

One of the most important responsibilities of a Power BI administrator is the management of Power BI Premium capacities. From a Power BI administration perspective, Power BI Premium can be thought of as an organization’s dedicated hardware resources to support the use of the Power BI service.

Not all of an organization’s content needs to be hosted in Premium capacity. However, these resources enable the distribution of content to read-only Power BI Free users and they provide more consistent performance, among other scalability and management benefits.

Microsoft 365 global administrators and users assigned to the Power BI service administrator role automatically have the right to administer Premium capacities in the Power BI admin portal. An administrator’s role in relation to Premium capacity is to ensure that the provisioned resources are utilized according to the organization’s policies, and that...

Premium capacity resource optimization

Given the cost of Premium capacity, BI teams will want to follow practices to ensure that these resources are actually required and not being used inefficiently. For example, with large import mode datasets, a simple design change such as the removal of unused columns from a fact table can significantly reduce the size of the dataset and, hence, the amount of memory needed.

By following a series of recommended practices in terms of both modeling and report design, fewer Premium capacity resources will be required to deliver the same query performance and scale. With small-scale self-service BI datasets and reports, performance tuning and optimization are usually not necessary. Nonetheless, as these models and reports can later take on greater scale and importance, a basic review of the solution can be applied before the content is assigned to Premium capacity.

The following two sections identify several of the top data modeling and report...

Life cycle management with Premium

In addition to the enhanced life cycle management capabilities of Power BI Premium described in the Power BI deployment pipelines section of Chapter 10, Managing Workspaces and Content, the write capabilities of the XMLA endpoint enable additional capabilities with regard to life cycle management of datasets assigned to Premium capacities.

Specifically, given the write capabilities of the XMLA endpoint, the recommended tool for deploying incremental changes to datasets becomes the ALM Toolkit from MAQ Software, which is based on the BISM Normalizer by Christian Wade.

ALM Toolkit deployment

ALM Toolkit is a free, open source tool that enables the object-level comparison of source and target datasets and the incremental deployment of changes such as new or revised DAX measures. ALM Toolkit can be downloaded from http://alm-toolkit.com.

Once downloaded, simply run the .msi installer file to install. After installation, ALM Toolkit is...

Summary

This chapter reviewed Power BI Premium as the primary means to deploy Power BI at scale and with enterprise BI tools and controls. The features and administration of Power BI Premium were described, as well as the factors to account for inefficiently provisioning and allocating Premium capacity. Finally, life cycle management concerns particular to Premium capacity features were explored.

This book has been all about how to enable enterprise-level business intelligence using Power BI, and this chapter highlighted some of the exclusive features that Power BI Premium provides in pursuit of this goal. We hope you have enjoyed this book and are now confident in how to apply this knowledge within your own organization.

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