Power BI Components Overview

Power BI is Microsoft’s business intelligence (BI) offering that contains several tightly integrated software and Microsoft-hosted components, which are used collectively to create and share reports, dashboards, and other forms of BI.

Data modeling (left). Data engineers create shared datasets using Power BI Desktop, Analysis Services semantic data models via SQL Server Data Tools, and data integration pipelines via Power BI Dataflows, a feature that provides extract, transform, and load (ETL)-type capabilities.

Report design (middle left). Power BI reports are created by authors and developers using Power BI Desktop (a free Windows desktop report design tool), current versions of Excel, SQL Server Reporting Services tools, and programmatically via a Power BI REST API. Collaboration features include workspaces, which allow multiple users to work on data models and reports together.

Back end hosting (middle right). The back end infrastructure, sometimes referred to as a repository, includes five online services and one on-premises server product that are capable of hosting reports, shared datasets, semantic data models, and integration pipelines. The online services and on-premises server provide similar functionality, including access to data sources, report rendering, and user access management, but are designed for distinctly different workloads because they differ in performance and security features and vary by which report types, design tools, clients, and features are supported.