Summary

Congratulations on exploring an exciting option for reusable, standardized data that can bring great benefits to teams who need single sources of truth. In this chapter, we created a date table dataflow using M code and learned about the mechanics of using the Power Query Editor online.

Accessing Power BI Report Server

To get started, you will need to know how your organization’s IT governs its servers, hardware, applications, and data. You may need to submit a help desk ticket, or you may be authorized to go directly to Microsoft’s Download Center and install it yourself. Regardless of the path forward, it’s very important to know and abide by any data governance that’s established.

If you are installing it yourself, simply go to https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/report-server/ and select Download Free Trial as shown in Figure 10.1 below, or use Advanced download options to specify what you need:

Figure 10.1: Download the free trial or go to Advanced download options to start

If you intend to use the paid version, then you will need Power BI Premium or SQL Server Enterprise Software Assurance (SA)—this is why you will want to coordinate with your central IT.

It is very important that you select the right...

Deploying to Power BI Report Server

If you’re a traditional BI developer who has built Reporting Services reports, you might feel right at home with Power BI Report Server, as the configuration and portals were largely borrowed from Reporting Services. You’re going to use a special Power BI desktop that is optimized for the server. The main reason for the separate desktop is to ensure that the desktop doesn’t promote a feature that the server does not support. This is an important point to note. One key advantage of using this approach is that Report Server can also host your traditional Reporting Services reports, KPIs, and mobile reports.

Deploying a Power BI report

Before deploying your report, you may want to create some folders to simplify finding your reports later. For example, creating a folder for finance, HR, inventory, IT, operations, and sales is a common starting point. Don’t worry, you can always move the reports later if you’...

Securing reports

You can secure a report in the Manage screen of a report or folder. To access this area, select a report folder or report, select the ellipsis button, and click Manage. Then, go to the Security tab. By default, reports and folders inherit security from their parent folder, but this can be undone quickly by clicking Customize Security.

Keep in mind that there’s quite a bit of overlap in the roles that can be assigned, mainly due to the context of what you’re securing (My Reports or the public folder of reports). The security roles that you can select are listed as follows:

• Browser: Can view the reports and folders, and subscribe to the reports.
• Content Manager: Can manage folders, reports, and resources.
• My Reports: Can publish reports and manage folders, reports, and resources in a user’s My Reports folder.
• Publisher: Can publish reports on your Power BI Report Server.
• Report Builder: Can review any definitions...

Scheduling data refreshes

Refreshing data in Power BI Report Server comes with a lot more caveats than using the Power BI cloud service. For example, refreshing is contingent on the data source that the report is using. Since you’ve installed this server inside your firewall, there’s no need for a data management gateway to refresh the data either. As you create refreshing schedules, the server will simply create SQL Server Agent jobs to control the refreshes, such as Reporting Services.

If you plan on refreshing data sources that are derived from files, make sure you use a network path for that file (\\computername\sharename\file.csv), not a local path (such as C:\Downloads\File.csv). You can do this in Power BI Desktop by going to the Home ribbon and selecting Edit Queries | Data Source Settings. Click Change Source and change any file references to a network path, such as \\MyComputer\c$\Downloads\File.csv.

Once you do that, publish the report to the server...

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Throughout this book, we've focused on building reports that will ultimately be deployed to the web through the Power BI service or shown in the mobile application. In this chapter, we'll show you how to deploy reports to Power BI Report Server, which is likely being hosted on-premises at your company. For many companies, this is a must-have, since cloud deployments are often not allowed with their type of data or industry.

Power BI Report Server is an on-premises version of the Power BI service that gives you a subset of the features of the full service. Unlike the full service, which...