What is Power BI Premium?

As the Power BI landscape continues to evolve, Microsoft has adapted to these changes with the recent announcement of Power BI Premium. In last week's free webinar, Dustin Ryan, a Data Platform Solutions Architect with Microsoft, discussed the new features and capabilities of Power BI Premium. Additionally, he provided insight as to how these changes might affect existing Power BI users and demonstrated how to use these new capabilities.

Due to the large volume of unanswered questions during the webinar, Dustin selected a few important ones to help provide a clearer understanding of Power BI Premium.

To learn more about this topic from Dustin's perspective, feel free to browse his website. Slides from Dustin's presentation are available, which you can download here.

Miss the webinar? Catch up with this recording of the entire presentation:

1. Will the Power BI Report Server preview work with SQL Server 2016 Developer Edition?

Yes, the Power BI Report Server preview will work with SQL 2016 Developer Edition. It can be set up in a developer environment. The Developer Edition includes the full features of SQL Server.

2. How often will Power BI Desktop (Report Server) be updated?

The SSRS team talked about this in their latest blog post in the section under “Modern, rapid release cycle”. The team has stated that, “We plan to release not every couple of years or even every year, but multiple times per year.” How many times per year exactly is unknown, but it will be at least more than once per year.

3. If we have SQL Server Enterprise Edition, can we still install Power BI Report Server?

I mentioned this in a blog post I published earlier, but there are basically two ways you get the rights to install Power BI Report Server:

1. Purchase Power BI Premium
2. Purchase SQL Server Enterprise Edition with Software Assurance

4. When will Power BI Report Server be generally available?

The product teams have publicly stated that Power BI Report Server will be generally available late in the second quarter of 2017, so next month (June).

5. With Power BI Premium, do developers still need a Pro license?

The answer to this question is yes. Developers will still need a Pro license, as only users with Pro licenses can share content. The user's view content deployed to Premium capacity will not need a Pro license, but developers creating and sharing the content with consumers would still need a Pro license.