Updated: February 23, 2022 (September 2, 2019)

Power BI Dataflows Offer Integrated ETL

Andrew analyzes and writes about Microsoft's data management, business intelligence, and machine learning solutions, as well as aspects of licensing... more

Power BI introduces Dataflows, a built-in Power BI offering that could reduce the need to use other ETL solutions.
Dataflows has limited data storage options and requires using the Common Data Model, and it may only appeal to customers entrenched in Office 365 and Dynamics 365.
There are no migration paths from SQL Server Integration Services, so customers migrating traditional SQL Server environments may opt for Azure Data Factory instead.

Power BI is a set of Microsoft business intelligence (BI) technologies that includes several tightly integrated software and Microsoft-hosted service components. Dataflows, a new addition to Power BI shown here, offers data integration capabilities, but this initial release may interest only a few customers with specific needs.

Data Integration Overview

Data integration, typically called extract, transform, and load (ETL), involves gathering data from multiple sources, consolidating and cleaning the data, and then storing the resulting dataset into a location for access by BI applications and other tools.

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