Power BI's browser-based SaaS component: people publish and share reports and semantic models there, create dashboards and apps, and set up scheduled data refreshes.
Read more: Microsoft Learn
In the Ultra Transcenders books
Each book explains Power BI service in context, with comparison tables and the common traps.
Terms in this definition
- Power BI
Microsoft's analytics and reporting service. It reaches data held on-premises through the on-premises data gateway.
- SaaS
A cloud model in which you consume a finished application that the provider operates, Microsoft 365 for instance. Nearly everything is the provider's job; you look after your data, users and devices.
- Azure Machine Learning component
Reusable building block for a pipeline, versioned and self-contained, much like a function: it declares a name, inputs and outputs, and bundles the command, code and environment it runs.
- Share
In OpenSharing, the container you fill with tables, views, volumes, models and notebooks for recipients. You need
CREATE SHAREon the metastore to make one; add a schema and all its assets, including later ones, go with history. - CRUD
Shorthand for create, read, update and delete, the four basic things you do with data. Data-plane roles in Azure Cosmos DB, for instance, authorise those operations on items.
- Set
Secret permission in Key Vault for writing secrets; some older material refers to it as Create.
Related terms
- Best Practice Analyzer
A prebuilt notebook you can launch for any semantic model in the Power BI service. It scores your design on over 60 checks covering speed, DAX quality, avoiding errors, upkeep and formatting, and running it calls for Build rights plus a Fabric-backed workspace.
- Dataflow
Holds reusable Power Query preparation in the Power BI service, so multiple semantic models can draw on the same clean tables. Gen1 is now legacy; Gen2 is Microsoft's suggested choice wherever Fabric is on hand.
- Export to PowerPoint
Turns a report into a slide deck from the Power BI service: each report page becomes a static 1,280 x 720 picture with a link to the original report. For live, interactive pages in slides, the Power BI add-in for PowerPoint is used instead.
- GraphQLApi.Execute.All
Lets signed-in users run GraphQL queries or mutations against Fabric through a Microsoft Entra app registration. The app registration has to be granted this delegated permission from the Power BI service.
- Include in report refresh
A property of a Power Query query. Unticking it leaves that query out whenever the report is refreshed, scheduled refreshes in the Power BI service included, which is useful for reference data that never changes.
- Live connection
Power BI reports can skip having a local model and instead connect straight to one already published in the Power BI service, Azure Analysis Services or SQL Server Analysis Services. Authors may still write report-level measures; editing the underlying model is possible only after converting it via Make changes to this model.
- OneDrive refresh
Roughly every hour, the Power BI service checks the .pbix, Excel or CSV file that a semantic model and report came from, if it lives on OneDrive or SharePoint Online, and syncs any changes. Scheduled data refresh is different: it queries the underlying sources.
- Persistent filters
Enabled by default, this report option remembers the slicers, filters and sorting a person applied in the Power BI service and restores them when they come back. Choosing Reset to default clears those saved changes.