Power BI Components Overview

Power BI is Microsoft’s business intelligence (BI) offering that contains several integrated software modules and Microsoft cloud components, which are used to create semantic data models (datasets), deploy data pipelines to gather data from various sources, and build and share reports, dashboards, and metrics. The components are used collectively to provide a unified cloud platform that organizations can use to replace existing BI deployments.

The components include the following:

Data management tools (left). Semantic data models (also called datasets) are created using Power BI Desktop, Power BI portal, and SQL Server Data Tools. Datamarts (in preview) automate the creation and integration of an Azure SQL Database deployment. Data integration is provided via Power BI Dataflows, a built-in extract, transform, and load (ETL) component that allows users to create refreshable data pipelines.

Design tools (middle left). Power BI-hosted content is created and shared using a variety of tools. Content can include semantic data models, reports, dashboards, metrics, Excel files, and traditional SQL Server Report Definition Language (RDL) tabular reports. Report developers can also create Power BI apps: that ability lets authors bundle certain reports and dashboards together for specific groups of users. For example, a Power BI app for the financial forecast team can contain (point to) just the relevant reports from the hundreds of financial, sales, and production reports that an organization may have, helping users find the reports they need.