I’m sitting on the blogger’s table for the PASS Summit 2014 keynote, and this post is a quick summary of all of the BI-related announcements (minor and hopefully major) made this year. The really interesting developments will get their own, dedicated blog posts later…
- Azure Machine Learning is now available to everyone with a Microsoft Account ID with no credit card or subscription necessary http://blogs.technet.com/b/dataplatforminsider/archive/2014/11/05/microsoft-announces-major-update-to-azure-sql-database-adds-free-tier-to-azure-machine-learning.aspx
- It was announced (again) that Power BI in the cloud will be able to connect back to on-prem SSAS servers via the Data Management Gateway soon
- James Phillips, the new guy in charge of MS BI, showed the same – new – Power BI that he showed at WPC this summer. This is not the Power BI that’s released today, but one with a much nicer dashboard experience and one that can be edited (rearrange charts, change chart types, combine two charts into a single combo-chart) directly from the browser.
- Also in this new Power BI you can connect direct to services like SalesForce or upload Excel spreadsheets direct from the browser – you are building your models in the browser, not in Excel. This is significant for people who don’t have the right version of Excel/Office 365 right now, a very welcome development.
- And all of this is HTML5, no Silverlight thank goodness. So it will work on far more devices.
- Public preview of the new Power BI is coming soon!
Hi Chris,
Do you know if there is a program from early adopters to start experimentally in Ms Connect ?
thank you
Stefan
No, there’s no public preview programme right now.
Reblogged this on MS Excel | Power Pivot | DAX and commented:
A New Power Bi. It’s getting quite hard to keep the pace.
Connecting back to on-prem SSAS servers > just for tabular SSAS you think or also multidimensional?
I don’t think that was mentioned in the keynote, sorry.
OK, it has just been confirmed that both Tabular AND Multidimensional SSAS will be supported.
Hi Chris,
Thanks for the update.
I’m very excited about Power BI connecting to on-prem SSAS. We’ve taken a big gamble on our current DW project that this functionality would come along soon. So, if it works as I hope, then I might just keep my job…
So do you have any idea what ‘able to connect back to on-prem SSAS servers’ actually means?
What we really need is for a Power BI worksheet (or a Power View report, or whatever) to create MDX or DAX, send the query through the Gateway to our on-prem cube or model, execute the query on our on-prem instance, then get the resultset back through the gateway. Pretty much the way ProClarity server used to do it. That would be super.
Do you think this is what they mean by ‘able to connect’?
Hi Sam, I don’t think the level of detail you’re looking for has been made public yet. Sorry….
Exciting news! Thanks for sharing. Any indications as to when they will make this available to partners?
No, not yet. Soon hopefully.
Chris, do you know when and where the keynote recording will be available for us? I did not had the chance to watch it yesterday…
No idea, sorry…
Hi, Chris, outstanding coverage (as usual). Was there any talk about the ability to deploy SSRS reports that will point back to on-prem data sources? The news on SSAS on-prem is great. Hoping to see the SSRS capability down that road – that one is a potential game-changer. Thanks
No news on SSRS unfortunately.
Does the new HTML 5 support mean we can see the Power Views from any device, like an android phone/tablet?
Yes, it does. It doesn’t mean that Power View is optimised for these devices though…