Premium Per User. Licensed person by person, it adds most Premium capacity features on top of everything Pro offers. Items in a PPU workspace are shareable only with other PPU licence holders, and no Fabric capacity comes with it.
Also called Premium Per User.
Read more: Microsoft Learn
In the Ultra Transcenders books
DP-900DP-600DP-700PL-300DP-800
Each book explains PPU in context, with comparison tables and the common traps.
Terms in this definition
- Premium
Hosting plan for Azure Functions that keeps instances pre-warmed to avoid cold starts and supports VNet integration. Executions time out after 30 minutes by default, which host.json can extend.
- Capacity
A reserved block of compute for a tenant whose size is fixed by its SKU; Fabric F SKUs express it in capacity units (CUs). Workspaces assigned to it unlock features like Copilot, and from F64 upwards people with free licences can view Power BI content.
- Document Intelligence add-on capabilities
Extra Document Intelligence options switched on with the features query parameter: barcodes, formulas, keyValuePairs, languages, ocrHighResolution, queryFields and styleFont.
- Workspace
Teams in Power BI and Microsoft Fabric collaborate in this folder-style container, which groups items such as reports, semantic models and lakehouses, controls who can access them and is assigned a capacity.
- Licence
What entitles one particular user to the services a subscription offers. Each product licence is made up of several service plans (one per app or service), and before giving it to someone an admin has to record that user's usage location.
- Fabric capacity
The compute behind Microsoft Fabric, sized in capacity units (CUs). Microsoft recommends F SKUs, purchased via Azure with per-second billing.
Related terms
- Change detection
With this kind of automatic page refresh, Power BI polls a single measure on a schedule and redraws the page only if the measure's result has changed. Only one such measure is allowed per model, and in the service it requires Fabric, Premium or PPU capacity; shared capacity cannot use it.
- Embed in SharePoint Online
Shows a report, or one visual from it, inside a modern SharePoint Online page by way of the Power BI web part; the link comes from File, Embed report in the service. Access rules and RLS continue to apply, and anyone viewing it needs a Pro or PPU licence, except when that content is hosted on F64 (or larger) or Premium.
- Free licence
Every user gets this Fabric licence on first sign-in. With it, people can build non-Power BI items on F or Trial capacity, but can open Power BI content only when the capacity is F64 or bigger, and need Pro or PPU to share Power BI content.
- My workspace
The private area each user has for their own content. To create and share Power BI content in any other workspace, a user needs Pro or Premium Per User licensing.
- Power BI Premium capacity
Microsoft has stopped selling its P1 to P5 Power BI capacity licences and retires each one as the customer's agreement term expires; Fabric F SKUs take their place. Per-user Pro and Premium Per User licences carry on unchanged.
- Power BI Pro
A Power BI licence assigned to each user, which lets them build, share and work together on Power BI content beyond their own My workspace. Where the capacity is smaller than F64, anyone viewing Power BI content must also hold Pro, Premium Per User or a personal trial.
- Real-time DirectQuery partition
Turning this incremental refresh option on makes a table hybrid: rows newer than the refresh period are read through an extra DirectQuery partition. Premium, PPU or Embedded is needed, and Dual storage mode is advisable for related tables.
- Scheduled refresh
Each semantic model gets its own timetable via Refresh > Schedule refresh in the service. A gateway is needed for on-premises data, and the daily limit is 8 runs with Pro licences or shared capacity, rising to 48 for PPU and Premium or Fabric capacity.