If you are an organization that deals with a large volume of data but don’t yet understand the best practices to utilize it, don’t worry, you are not alone. Many companies have not yet explored the possibilities and opportunities that their data has. Data analytics and data visualization are the two advanced technologies that allow companies to deliver data in the most efficient way possible. Data visualization when aptly leveraged to generate interactive reports is easier to understand and interpret.
The data visualization market is expected to increase to 7.76 billion U.S. dollars by 2023, with a CAGR of 9.47 percent over the forecast period. – Statista
To help enterprises get instant answers with rich dashboards anywhere, anytime, Microsoft offers a business intelligence tool called Power BI. To enhance the features that this tool offers, Microsoft upgraded Power BI for their premium users. Microsoft offers advanced self-service data preparation that makes the delivery of insights and collaboration easier for enterprises. With Power BI Premium services, companies can achieve greater scalability and improve performance of Power BI content. It enables more users in an organization to get better performance and responsiveness of their Power BI applications. It offers the following benefits:
- Rich personalized dashboards
- Publish reports securely
- Extracting business intelligence rapidly and accurately
- Balanced simplicity and performance
- Advanced data analytics
Power BI Premium
Capacities are a core Power BI concept that represent a set of resources like storage, processor and memory, used to host and deliver Power BI content. Power BI Premium consists of capacity in the Power BI service exclusively allocated to each organization.
The capacity is supported by dedicated hardware that is fully managed by Microsoft. Power BI Premium is a capacity-based offering that provides:
- Access to the latest features for embedded analytics
- Greater scale and performance for your Power BI reports
- Flexibility to license by capacity
- AI-driven analysis, composable and reusable dataflows and paginated reports
- Unify self-service and enterprise BI with a variety of Premium-only capabilities
- Built-in license to extend on-premises BI with Power BI Report Server
- Ability to publish and share Power BI content with anyone in or out of the organization without purchasing a per-user license
Power BI Premium Gen 2
Power BI Premium Gen 2 for enterprises is a recent release of Power BI Premium. Premium Gen 2 will simplify the management of Premium capacities and reduce management overhead. It is currently in preview and is available for Premium subscribers to use during the preview period. Companies can choose either the original version of Premium or switch to using Premium Gen 2.
Auto scaling with Gen 2
Conventionally, if an organization reaches its full capacity, often, the content refreshes end up failing. However, with Power BI Premium Gen 2, companies can auto scale as per their requirements. They just have to pay as they go in case of an overflow of workloads.
This is possible with the integration of Azure Pay and Power BI’s placement mechanism. It typically places new content on the node with the most available memory at the time the content is loaded. This helps the view or refresh operation to gain access to the most resources and perform optimally.
Premium Gen 2 capacity load evaluation
Power BI evaluates the throughput limitations of the CPU from the enterprise’s capacity on an ongoing basis. This allows operations to complete at a faster rate and compare the results to what their purchased capacity can support. Each Premium Gen 2 evaluation consists of 2 different aggregations:
Interactive utilization: It is evaluated by considering all interactive operations that are completed on or near the current 30-second evaluation cycle.
Background utilization: It is evaluated by considering all the background operations that are completed during the past 24 hours.
Premium Gen 2 provides the following updates or improved experiences:
- Ability to license Premium per user along with the per capacity
- Enhance performance on any capacity size, anytime
- Run analytics operations up to 16X faster
- Perform operations at top speed even when the load on the capacity approaches the capacity limits
- Greater scale
- Fewer memory restrictions
- Built-in reporting provides improved metrics, utilization analysis, budget planning, chargebacks and the need to upgrade
- Auto scale prevents slowdowns caused by overload
- Reduce management overhead with proactive and configurable admin notifications about capacity utilization level and load increasing
Updates on the roll-out
Microsoft has updated their Power BI Premium Gen 2 app and added a few new features like:
- Memory tracking of data assets
- Performance profiling of artifacts hosted on capacities
- Overload analysis and the severity of the effects
The next generation of Power BI Premium (Gen 2) will be generally available at the end of September. Timelines for migration from Gen1 to Gen 2 will be announced a few weeks after the general availability.
To know more about implementing Power BI for your business intelligence needs, you can contact our expert team.
