What’s a Power BI datamart? 

Today we are looking at Power BI Datamart. Power BI Datamart is a new self-service capability available with Power BI Premium licence option. It enables users to uncover actionable insights through their own data without any help from IT teams.  It also enables you to build an entire BI Ecosystem yourself.

Microsoft Docs

Datamart in the BI Ecosystem 

The Datamart uses the Dataflows for the data transformation.  An underlying Azure SQL Database to store its data and automatically creates a dataset linked to this Azure SQL Database and this is then used to create your reports.  

Licence requirements to use a Power BI Datamart

Despite the fact that Datamart builds an Azure SQL Database, there is no need to buy a separate license because all that is required is Power BI Premium capacity or Premium Per User license. The database, the dataflow and the dataset will be the part of that Power BI license.

Getting started with Datamart 

Using Power BI Datamart you can create Power BI models directly inside the cloud and so you can use any operating system for example Mac of Windows and there are no other tools needed making it a one stop shop. 

Remember that you will need a premium Power BI workspace, so either premium capacity or premium per user. 

By using the “Get Data” option, you can select the desired data source. I’ve selected Sharepoint folder, but there are plenty of supported sources including local ones that can be connected by using a Gateway.

At this stage you can do data transformations using Power Query in the cloud on the Power BI service and this is much the same as in the desktop version.

After clicking “Save” the data will be loaded into the data model.  Now you can do some modeling steps using power query and this process is similar with Power BI Desktop as well and you can create DAX measures and relationships and write SQL scripts switching views between the icons on the bottom.

In your workspace you will find the Auto Generated dataset, the datamart and the dataset is not needed for this case.

What is the underlaying technology being used?

The Power BI Datamart underlying technology is an Azure SQL database and it can be used by any front-end tool that can connect to SQL Server. The connection string can be found in the Datamart settings and used, for example, for SQL Management Studio (requires the latest version) to connect to the datamart.  You can then perform queries to the data by using the views.

As the last step, you can create reports on top of the Datamart and share it with users.

Making the process of accessing “ready to build from” data models across your organization simple and efficient, Power BI Datamarts are a fantastic new way to bridge the gap between IT and analysts.

Learn more about Power BI by joining one of our training sessions. Or read more of our blog here.