Updated: May 31, 2023 (February 17, 2023)

Power BI’s New Datamart Option

Andrew analyzes and writes about Microsoft's data management, business intelligence, and machine learning solutions, as well as aspects of licensing... more

Power BI is previewing Power BI Datamart, a new data hosting option (top left) for Premium customers that automates the creation of an Azure SQL Database deployment and the integration of the database with Power BI.

Power BI Datamarts are not a single data component, but rather a combination of three components that are tightly integrated:

A database hosted in Azure SQL Database
A Power BI dataflow that runs extract, transform, and load (ETL) pipelines to deliver data to Power BI
A Power BI dataset that mirrors the datamart database schema and provides a data model for Power BI users to build reports against.

Users can build reports and other datasets directly against either the auto-created Power BI dataset or the Datamart database. Because of the tight interdependence of Power BI components and the need to maintain security and governance, Datamart databases can only be modified and updated through the Power BI Datamart interface. However, they can be queried directly in Azure SQL Database through SQL Server–compliant query tools.

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