I'm trying to understand the difference between those two things: Power BI and Azure Analyses Services. Is that the same? What advantages does AAS give using it with Power BI? I found a lot of articles comparing Power BI Premium with AAS. But what if I have "pro" version? It's still unclear in which case I should use any of these tools.

I will be thankful if somebody explains what is each tool for. Thanks in advance

CodePudding user response：

It is oversimplified, but we could say that Azure Analysis Services (AAS) is a cloud version of SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS). But while SSAS has some data visualization capabilities, AAS is intended to build data models in Azure. Usually Excel, Power BI or another tool is used to visualize and analyze these models. Think for AAS and SSAS as a place, where you can store your data and build data models, while Power BI is a layer above it.

Power BI is also a broad set of tools. You can use Power BI Desktop application to design and build reports. It can connects to hundreds different data sources and can be used on your Windows PC completely free, even without an account for Power BI. Under the hood, it runs SSAS to store the data and the model, but this is transparent for the user.

Power BI Service is a service provided by Microsoft, where you can publish reports made with Power BI Desktop, and then these reports can be seen in a web browser. These reports are hosted and rendered in a shared infrastructure, which means that your reports are hosted and rendered on the same servers, as reports by other users. To be able to publish reports there, you must have an account for Power BI. They are two types - a free one and Pro. So Power BI Pro is just a paid ($10/user/month) license to use Power BI Service.

Power BI Premium is an offering from Microsoft, which gives you a dedicated hardware (they call it capacity) to host and render your Power BI reports. So if you publish a report to Power BI Service, you can buy a dedicated capacity (either Power BI Premium or Power BI Embedded) and assign your reports to it - then it will be used to render your reports and it will not be shared with other Power BI users. You can think for this as a "shared web hosting" vs "dedicated web server/VPS hosting". Power BI Premium is quite expensive and can't be paused (i.e. using it or not, you pay a monthly fee), while Power BI Embedded is a similar offering, but as an Azure service, which doesn't has this commitment and can be paused when not used (think for this as a VM in Azure, which you can start and stop whenever you want).

Power BI Premium has different SKUs - P1, P2, P3, EM1, etc. These P SKUs gives you some additional options. Normally, to share a report published in Power BI Service, both you and the users which whom the report is shared, should have Power BI Pro licenses. If you pay for Premium P SKU, then only the publisher of the report must pay for a Pro license, while the consumers can use Power BI Free licenses. So Power BI Premium usually is cost effective for organizations with a large number of users.