Microsoft usually has some interesting announcements at the PASS Summit, and this year was no exception.  I’m writing a set of blogs covering the major announcements.  Next up is the technical Preview for Power BI reports on-prem in SSRS.

The Technical Preview is a pre-configured Virtual Machine in the Azure Marketplace that includes everything you need to get started, even sample reports and data.  With this update, you can visually explore data and create an interactive report using Power BI Desktop, and then publish that report to an on-premises report server (SQL Server Reporting Services).  You can then share the report with your coworkers so they can view and interact with it in their web browsers.

Check out the Official announcement.  Get it now in the Azure Marketplace.  An excellent step-by-step tutorial is at Technical Preview of Power BI reports in SQL Server Reporting Services now available and Create Power BI reports in the SQL Server Reporting Services Technical Preview.  Post questions in the Reporting Services forum.  For users who would prefer to run this technical preview on an on-premises server, you can provision a virtual machine and then download the image as a .vhd file and use Hyper-V functionality to do so (see How to run the Technical Preview of Power BI Reports in SQL Server Reporting Services on-prem using Hyper-V).

Previously you would use Power BI Desktop to build reports and you would publish them to the Power BI Service in the cloud.  This is a solution for those that do not want to publish their reports to the cloud.

This preview supports Power BI reports that connect “live” to Analysis Services models – both Tabular and Multidimensional (cubes).  Additional data sources will be added in a future preview.  There is a new feature in this version: the ability to add comments to reports.  Make sure to check out Ten things you might have missed in the Technical Preview of Power BI Reports in SQL Server Reporting Services.

Microsoft plans to release the production-ready version in the next SQL Server release wave.  They won’t be releasing it in a Service Pack, Cumulative Update, or other form of update for SSRS 2016.  The Technical Preview is effectively a pre-release of SSRS vNext.

More info:

First thoughts on Power BI on premises

Power BI Reports in SSRS Techinical Preview

Power BI reports in SQL Server Reporting Services: Feedback on the Technical Preview