What Power BI XMLA Endpoints means for you

Are you taking advantage of Power BI’s modeling capability? This is a terrific built in capability and many users build models as they begin to design their reports.  

However, as we transition Power BI into being our enterprisevisualization and reporting tool, some of the legacy applications justaren’t going to go away. Many of those applications connect to XMLAendpoints from other semantic model providers such as analysis serviceson your SQL on prem.

So, the Power BI team decided to give you the ability to do the same. Thereis a newly announced feature in public preview called XMLA Endpointsfor Power BI. Beyond the ability to connect to the XMLA endpoints withother analytical dashboarding tools (like Tableau), you can also connectto it from other toolsets that support XMLA.

For example, many of the Microsoft development tools give youthe ability to connect as well, things like SQL Server ManagementStudio (SSMS), SQL Server Profiler, DAX Studio and even from Excel pivottables. Just keep in mind it’s only currently available forread access, so some of your capabilities will be limited. Microsoftdocumentation on this feature states that they will be planning to offera read/write option soon.

From a licensing perspective, access to XMLA Endpoints isavailable for datasets in Power BI Premium only, but any user canconnect to the endpoints regardless of whether they have a Pro license.The feature itself is turned on within the settings of the Power BIPremium tenant. This is only available in preview at this time, so it’snot supported in production.

In this scenario, other tools such as SQL Server data tools or typeswhere you can play with the model give you the ability to change yourmodel with Visual Studio. Now you can start to see a scenariowhere you can start to use Git Hub repositories to manage your sourcecontrol on the models among other endless uses.

I must say I’m impressed with the modular approach of theteam to roll out Power BI as a 100% enterprise class tool. First, we sawthe Data Flows feature which extracts the ELT/ELT into its own lane.Then things like composite models was introduced where you can haveoffline and online data sources. Now we’ve got XMLA Endpoints whichclearly defines 3 separate layers of development within the Power BIecosystem.

These recently added features have opened some great avenues andspread user adoption and I know there are more great things to come. Thecommitment of the team to evolve and improve this product has beenexcellent and I look forward to what they’ll roll out next.