It is very difficult for an organisation to decide whether to buy Power BI Premium or to stick with Power BI Pro. Power BI Premium represents a big financial commitment, but how do you know whether the benefits will be worth the costs involved? This was a question that Melissa Coates and I dealt with in great detail in the second version of our white paper “Planning A Power BI Enterprise Deployment”, and I strongly suggest you read the relevant section (pages 37-42) if you are considering buying Premium.
However, it’s one thing to read a white paper and another to actually test Premium yourself – and right now there is no way of trying Premium before you buy it. As more and more features like SSRS paginated reports or linked entities in dataflows get added to Premium, the more likely it is you are going to want to test these features before buying Premium. So what do you do? The answer is to use Power BI Embedded instead. It’s not exactly the same thing as Premium (the setup experience is different, for one thing), but there are three significant facts to point out:
- I have been assured by several senior Microsoft employees that all new Premium features will be available in both the Premium (EM and P) SKUs and the Embedded (A) SKUs. So, for example, when the SSRS paginated report feature is released it will be available in both Premium and Embedded.
- The resources available (in terms of the number of v-cores and memory) in the various Premium SKUs mirror those available in the Embedded SKUs. For example a P1 Premium SKU has the same resources available as an A4 Embedded SKU.
- With Power BI Embedded, unlike Power BI Premium, you only need to pay for what you use: you can pause a Power BI Embedded capacity when you are not using it and pay nothing.
Therefore, to sum up, if you want to test Premium features before you buy, all you need to do is create a new Power BI Embedded capacity in the Azure portal and assign a Workspace to it – and you’ll get access to all the Premium features. When you’ve finished just pause the capacity. You’ll still need to pay while you’re testing but it will be a fraction of the cost of buying Premium.
This sounds like excellent news for those companies who could never sign off the cost of Premium, however just how much will this method cost per hour / DTU / other?
Do all of the (A) SKUs support the preview feature of embedding an SSRS paginated report onto a PowerBI workspace?
Do you mean the ability to run SSRS reports inside Power BI? They will when it is released (it isn’t in public preview yet).