Power BI Inherits More Analysis Services Controls

• Power BI continues to add controls that could help enterprises migrate from Analysis Services running on-premises or in Azure.
• Power BI Analysis Services features support only Tabular models and are limited to Premium service tiers.

Power BI, Microsoft’s business intelligence (BI) offering, continues to add more traditional Analysis Services capabilities, making it the likeliest destination for customers migrating Analysis Services workloads to the cloud. Microsoft’s strategy (for several years now) is to make Power BI a superset of Azure Analysis Services and encourage customers to migrate from SQL Server Analysis Services and Azure Analysis Services. The latest series of enhancements and planned updates bring performance improvements, security features, and low-level server controls that many enterprises need in order to properly manage their deployments.

Analysis Services Overview

Analysis Services is an analytic processing component for complex data models used in data mining and other data analytic applications. It is available as part of SQL Server software on-premises and in Azure VMs, and as a managed service in Azure Analysis Services and Power BI Premium deployments. The managed services are mostly compatible with the server software but are updated more frequently and receive unique capabilities.