Overview of Power BI Embedded, Power BI Gateway and Power BI Report Server

Last updated on Sep 27 2021
Bhavin Mukherjee

Table of Contents

Overview of Power BI Embedded, Power BI Gateway and Power BI Report Server

The Power BI service (SaaS) and therefore the Power BI Embedded service in Azure (PaaS) have APIs for embedding the dashboard and reports. Once you are embedding the content, this gives you access to the latest Power BI features like dashboards, gateways, and app workspaces.
There are two scenarios for embedding Power BI content:
1. Embedding for organization’s users
(Who have Power BI license) It allows us to increase the Power BI service. It requires your application’s user sign in to the Power BI service to view the content.
After sign in, they only have access to dashboards and reports that they own or someone shared with them in the Power BI service.
2. Embedding for users and customers
It allows you to embed the dashboards and reports for users who don’t have a Power BI account. This type of embedding is also known as Power BI embedded.

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Power BI embedded

Power BI Embedded has benefits for an ISV, their developers, and the customers. For example, an ISV can start creating the visuals for free with Power BI Desktop. By minimizing the visual analytic development efforts, ISVs achieve faster time to market and stand out from the competitors with differentiated data experiences. Also, ISVs can opt to charge a premium for the additional value they create with embedded analytics.
With Power BI Embedded, your customers don’t need to know anything about Power BI. You can use two different methods to create an embedded application:
• Power BI Pro account
• Service principle
The Power BI Pro account acts as the master account of your applications (think of it as a proxy account). This account allows generating embed tokens which provide access to your application’s Power BI dashboards and reports.
Service principle can embed Power BI content into an application employing an app-only token. It also allows generating embed tokens which provide access to your application’s Power BI dashboards and reports.

Power BI Gateway

Power BI Gateway is a software which is required to access data situated in an on-premises network. Gateway plays a role like as a gatekeeper for the on-premises data source. If anyone wants to access on-premises data from the cloud or web-based app, that request goes through the gateway. The gateway attends all the connection requests, and access is granted based on their authentication and requirements.
Gateway does not transfer the data from the on-premises source to the client platform. But it directly connects that platform to the on-premises data source. The client can directly access the data from its on-premises location to use it for making a dashboard, reports, and data analysis.
Generally, a gateway is employed to facilitate the connection between a single data source and multiple data source to the on-premises data source.

Types of the Power BI Gateway

There are two types of Power BI gateways:
• Standard Mode
• Personal Mode

On-premises data gateway (standard mode)

On-premises data gateway allows connection with the multiple on-premises data sources for more than one user. You can use the data in Power BI, Azure Logic Apps, Azure Analysis Services, PowerApps, Microsoft Flow, etc.
You can establish direct connections to multiple data sources only installing this type of data gateway. This data gateway is very helpful for complex scenarios where multiple users need to access various data sources.

On-premises data gateway (personal mode)

The particular mode of on-premises data gateway allows only one user to connect to different data sources. It’s helpful when only one person needs to access the data sources. To create reports and the dashboards employing Power BI, the user cannot share its access privilege with other users.

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data gateway

Power BI Gateway Architecture

Power BI gateway functions play a role as a mediator between the cloud services and on-premises data sources. The On-premises data gateways run as a Windows service. This Windows service gets registered with the Gateway Cloud Service through Azure Service Bus.
The architecture and working of the data gateway with the help of the diagram given below:

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Architecture

Power BI gateway architecture is divided into three parts:
1. Cloud services
2. Gateway services
3. On-premises data sources
• According to Power BI, a cloud service creates a query which requires data from an on-premises data source.
• This query from cloud services goes to the gateway cloud service with encrypted credentials.
• The gateway cloud services process and analyze the request and then forward it to the Azure service bus. You don’t need to configure azure service bus separately because Power BI manages it by default.
• The Azure service bus keeps all the requests to be sent forward to the on-premises data gateway. The on-premises data gateway decrypted credentials for the data source and connect the user to the data source.
• The on-premises data gateway forwards the query sent from the cloud service to the on-premises data source.
• The data query is executed at a data source that can be SQL Server, SharePoint, files, SSAS, etc.
• Result of the query is returned to On-premises data gateway by the data source. The On-premises data gateway sends the result back to the cloud service via Azure Service Bus.

Building Blocks of Power BI

There are five building blocks, such as Visualization, Reports, Dashboards, Datasets, and Tiles.

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Building Blocks

Visualization: The visualization is a type of chart or visuals that built by the Power BI designers. These visuals display the data from the datasets and report.
For example, line graph, pie chart, bar charts, and other graphical representation of the source data on a top geographical map, etc.
• Reports: A report is a collection of one or more pages of interactive visuals, text, and graphics that together make a single report.
For example, state, city report, sales by country, profit by-products report, logistic performance report, etc.
• Dashboards: Dashboard is a single layer presentation of multiple visualizations with interactive visuals, text, and graphics. A dashboard collects the most important metrics, on one screen, to tell a story or answer a question. The dashboard content comes from one or more datasets and one or more reports.
For example, pie charts, bar charts, and geographical maps.
• Datasets: The dataset is a collection of data which is employed to create its visualization in Power BI.
For example, Oracle or SQL servers tables and excel sheets.
• Tiles: The tile is a single visualization in the report or on the dashboards.
For example, the pie chart in reports or dashboard.

Power BI DAX

DAX (Data Analysis Expressions) is a formula expression language. It can be employed in different BI and visualization tools. DAX is also known as function language in which the full code is kept inside a function. DAX programming formula contains two data types such as Numeric and Other.
Numeric includes currency, integers, and decimals, where Other includes string and a binary object.

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Power BI DAX

Power BI Report Server

Power BI Report Server is an on-premises report server with a web portal in which you display and manage reports and KPIs. Along with it come to the tools to create Power BI reports, mobile reports, paginated reports, and KPIs. Users can access those reports in different ways: viewing them on a web browser on any device, or as an email in their inbox.

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Power BI Report Server

Power BI Report Server is a specific edition of SQL Server Reporting Services that can host Power BI reports. For running Power BI Report Server, you don?t need to have SQL Server installation disk; the Report Server already comes with its setup files. You can download set up files. Power BI report server can host Power BI Reports as well as Reporting Services (SSRS) Reports.
With Power BI report server, there will be an instance of Power BI Desktop installation. The Power BI Desktop edition that comes with the report server should be employed to create Power BI reports. Otherwise, reports cannot be hosted on the report server. The Power BI Desktop report server edition is regularly updated, and its experience will be very similar to the Power BI Desktop.
You can download the latest edition of Power BI report server from the below link. https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/report-server/
You need two installation items such as Power BI report server and Power BI desktop report server edition (in 32 bit and 64-bit versions).

How does it work?

For understanding the Power BI DAX, it has main three fundamental concepts such as:
• Syntax
• Context
• Functions

1. Syntax

the syntax consists of various components that make up a formula.
1. Total Sales = SUM (Sales [SalesAmount])
• Total Sales is the measure name.
• The equal sign (=) operator indicates the beginning of the formula.
• The DAX function SUM adds up all the numbers in the Sales[SalesAmount] column.
• Parentheses () surround an expression containing one or more arguments. And all function requires at least one argument. An argument passes a value to a function.
• The reference table Sales.
• The referenced column [SalesAmount] in the Sales table. With this argument, the SUM function knows on which column to aggregate a SUM.

2. Context

Context is one of the essential concepts of DAX. It’s categorized into two parts; Row context and Filter context.
The Row-Context is the easiest thought of as the current row. It applies whenever a formula has a function which uses the filters to identify a single row in a table.
The Filter context is a little more challenging to understand than the Row context. You can most easily think of the Filter-Context as one or more filters applied in a calculation. The Filter-Context doesn’t exist in the Row-context’s stead. Instead, it uses in addition to the former. Look at the subsequent DAX formula.

3. Functions

Functions are predefined and ordered formula. They can perform calculations employing arguments passed on to them. These arguments can be text, numbers, logical values, or other functions.
So, this brings us to the end of blog. This Tecklearn ‘Overview of Power BI Embedded, Power BI Gateway and Power BI Report Server’ blog helps you with commonly asked questions if you are looking out for a job in Power BI. If you wish to learn Power BI and build a career in Business Intelligence domain, then check out our interactive, Microsoft Power BI Training, that comes with 24*7 support to guide you throughout your learning period. Please find the link for course details:

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Power Pivot for Data Modelling

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• Power Service
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• Integrating with SaaS applications
• Gateway

 

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