This is a excellent tool. Bringing it closer to home would be great but was cost prohibitive. Apparently, not anymore with the new shared architecture.

It used to cost $5,000 a month and run on dedicated hardware; now it’s a $20 per user cloud service, which proves that a multi-tenant architecture delivers better performance.

Business intelligence (BI) tools have always offered a very stratified approach to the data that’s supposed to inform decisions across entire organisations. Storing large amounts of data meant having a database that was complicated to manage and access, and running analytics meant working with OLAP cubes and lengthy ETL processes. Both the complexity of the technology and the cost of licensing meant that direct access to the data was limited and usually delayed — when it takes a day to run a report, you can’t have a real-time view of how your business is doing.

The power of Microsoft’s Power BI isn’t just that it offers more visualisations of the data once you get it, alongside the familiar paginated reports from SQL Server Analysis Services made self-service through Azure. It was always about bringing that data to business analysts and decision makers at scale, and giving them what we now call no-code tools to clean up the data and work with it without needing to be a professional data engineer, Arun Ulag, CVP of Microsoft Power BI, told TechRepublic. 

“To bring in data at scale and process it with Power BI Data Flows directly on Azure DB, with no code experiences, to be able to analyse unstructured text and images; things like sentiment analysis, key phrase extraction, language detection and image recognition are drag-and-drop no-code experiences built into Power BI.”  Read On: