Power BI is more than a tool for creating dashboards—it’s the foundation for building reliable, reusable data products. In this guide, we walk through how to use Microsoft Purview to manage your data products, secure business logic, and enable governed access for your team.
What Are Data Products in Power BI?
Data products are curated, packaged datasets or assets designed for reuse across an organization. These typically include:
- Lakehouses: Central repositories for raw, silver, and gold data.
- Semantic models: Business logic and measures built with DAX.
- Reports and dashboards: Visual tools for insights and decision-making.
Managing these properly ensures consistency, governance, and scalability.
1: Define Your Governance Domain in Purview
Use Case:
Patrick has a full medallion architecture set up in Fabric, with data flowing from raw to gold, a semantic model in place, and a Power BI report. His challenge? Managing this data stack as a data product with controlled access.
Solution:
Use Microsoft Purview to organize assets under a governance domain and define policies, ownership, and usage terms.
Steps:
- Open Microsoft Purview.
- Go to Catalog Management → Governance Domains.
- Create a new domain named, for example, “Data Bear YouTube Channel.”
- Add a description:
“This domain contains data products and glossaries related to Data Bear YouTube analytics.” - Choose a type (e.g., “Data Domain”) for pragmatic structuring.
2: Create and Register Data Products
Product 1: YouTube Lakehouse (Gold Data)
This includes metrics like views, watch time, and subscriber growth.
Key Metadata:
- Type: Dataset
- Audience: BI engineers, technical users
- Use Case: Building semantic models and reports for performance and content strategy
Assets to Include:
- Tables like
fact_video_stats,fact_daily_video_stats, and dimension tables from the Lakehouse
Governance Options:
- Terms of Use: Confidential—do not share outside the organization
- Documentation: Link to SharePoint or GitHub
- Policies:
- Purpose for access
- Approval workflows
- Access expiration (e.g., 1 year)
Product 2: Semantic Model
Patrick’s semantic model encapsulates critical business logic written in DAX. It’s essential this logic remains centralized and not duplicated across the organization.
Key Metadata:
- Type: Semantic Model
- Audience: BI engineers, business analysts
- Use Case: Standardized data analysis
Assets to Include:
- Power BI dataset from Fabric
- All internal data tables linked automatically
Product 3: Power BI Report
The report titled “Video Search and Stats” visualizes channel performance and is the final user-facing component of this data stack.
Key Metadata:
- Type: Report/Dashboard
- Audience: Analysts, business users, executives
- Use Case: Delivering insights and KPIs
Assets to Include:
- The actual Power BI report file
- Associated documentation, usage policies, and request forms
3: Set Access Policies and Approval Workflows
Benefits of Policy Management:
- Security: Prevents unauthorized reuse of sensitive data or business logic
- Clarity: Users know the terms, purpose, and owners
- Traceability: Admins can track who accesses what and why
Example Access Policy:
- Purpose: “Critical reporting”
- Justification: “Provide KPIs to Adam”
- Terms: No data copies allowed
- Approvers: Patrick and Marthe (data steward)
4: Publish Data Products to the Unified Catalog
Once all products are configured, publish the governance domain so team members can discover it in the Purview Unified Catalog.
From there, users like “Justin Case” can:
- Search the catalog
- Request access to a report or model
- Complete the policy form
- Trigger approval and access provisioning
Admins can track, approve, or deny access requests through the Requests dashboard in Purview.
Final Thoughts: Centralize, Govern, and Empower
With Purview, you bring structure and control to your Power BI ecosystem. This approach:
- Protects critical business logic
- Enables data reuse across teams
- Ensures governance and compliance
- Enhances discoverability of assets
For Power BI users managing complex environments, integrating Microsoft Purview is a must-have best practice.
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