Power BI Previews Datamart: More than a Large Dataset

• Power BI Datamart (in preview) simplifies the creation of and access to special databases hosted in Azure SQL Database.
• The configuration provides shared security, higher performance, larger databases, and access to more types of clients.
• A low-code interface eases creation but does not remove the need to use proper database design and querying techniques.
• The overall value will be determined by important unknown details about fees and scalability.

Power BI is Microsoft’s business intelligence (BI) offering. It contains several integrated software and Microsoft cloud components, which are used to build data models and datasets and create and share reports, dashboards, and other BI content.

Power BI Datamart is a new data hosting option for Premium customers that automates the creation of an Azure SQL Database deployment and the integration of the database with Power BI, removing much of the complexity of database deployment. Datamart databases are accessed like Power BI datasets and can be used with any other Power BI component to create reports, dataflows, and new datasets. They also use Power BI’s data governance, removing the need to set up separate security controls; however, datamart databases do not consume Power BI storage and they are able to grow much larger than a Power BI dataset.