SQL Server 2014 BI Migration Options

SQL Server provides two business intelligence (BI) roles that can impact the complexity and cost of migrating from SQL Server 2014:

Reporting Services is a platform for creating data-driven business and operational reports and is a standard in many organizations for generating traditional tabular reports.

Analysis Services is an analytical processing and data mining platform that can process and return results from large, complex datasets to help guide business decisions. Analysis Services has two modes of organizing data: Multidimensional mode and Tabular mode.

Reporting Services Destinations

Reporting Services is available in Azure VMs and support for hosting Reporting Services reports (RDLs) is available in Power BI Premium platforms.

SQL Server On-Premises and in Azure VMs

SQL Server Reporting Services (on-premises and in cloud services, such as Azure VMs) provides the full feature set for reporting and provides the only on-premises option. This configuration is only limited in size and performance by the hardware and OS on which it is deployed. Customers can deploy and use any version of SQL Server, which may be a deciding factor for customers with reports built on older versions.