Introduction to Power BI Datamart
What is a Power BI Datamart?
The public preview of Datamart, available in Power BI premium, was announced by Microsoft’s CVP Intelligence Platform Arun Ulagaratchagan in May 2022.
The self-service data analytics abilities in Power BI Datamarts empower everyone to build secured and governed databases from various data sources with no code experience. It’s not just a combination of few components: dataflow + data warehouses + dataset; but also comes with a unified web UI that you can use to get data from sources, do data transformations, query databases, and build relationships, measures, and calculations.
Image source: Microsoft Docs
Who can use a Power BI Datamart?
Anyone with Power BI Premium license! Whether you are already a BI developer, or someone with no developer background and never writes SQL code, Power BI Datamarts can be beneficial for you. There’s no need to install SSMS or Azure SQL databases, which means no other licenses are needed for a fully unified development platform. Plus, with the unified UI design, you no longer need to wait months for the IT team to build the databases you want.
Image source: Microsoft Docs
Benefits of a Power BI Datamart
Datamarts bridge the gap of business users and IT when it comes to databases. Users don’t need to have the knowledge to create subscriptions or resources in Azure. This managed self-service relational analytics solution enables all business users, with or without SQL coding experience, to drive insights on their own.
Import from multiple data sources without code
A Power BI Datamart allows importing from multiple data sources without code, i.e., Excel, data warehouses, Oracle databases and more. Users can discover and mingle their data with visual query, or advanced built-in SQL or their selected SQL tools.
Perform entire ETL processes
Entire ETL processes can be performed in a Power BI Datamart and all changes to the model within a Power BI Datamart will translate to Power BI desktop as well. Users can easily create relationships between the tables with just a few clicks. Within the datamart’s unified interface, we can also create measures, and advance modeling. This greatly shortens the time of modeling and database creation that’s often caused by a gap between business and IT.
Row-level security and improved governance
Power BI Datamarts apply Row-Level Security to both data and datasets. Users can safely share data and datasets, build reports with restricted data access to given users. Also, sensitivity labels will protect sensitive data. Users have total control over the governance and manageability.
Image source: Microsoft Docs
By allowing your business users to create datamarts directly within the Power BI ecosystem, you can unify your business taxonomies and data sources into one cohesive view. This will further strengthen a “single source of truth” so everyone in the organization has the same perspective on performance and progress towards your business goals.
The future of Power BI Datamarts
Power BI Datamarts are just in the beginning in terms of features and will be greatly enhanced in the future. As Power BI Datamarts become more common place, they will help simplify the experience for users with no code experience and give them the power to populate database and build datasets directly in Power BI Service. For Business Analysts with low coding experience, this is also a game changer that will empower them with the same level of functionalities that IT team would provide (but without the long wait time.)
As Power BI Datamart continues to develop, we look forward to seeing what other features will be built into the platform. Some possible developments could include…
- Log and monitor of dataflow
- Multi-developer environment
- Version control
- And more!
Learn more
Interested in learning how your business can leverage Power BI to improve business intelligence? Check out our current Power BI offers and assessments here.
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