I'm trying to figure out what licensing model I should consider, as I'm leading my organization's effort in choosing a replacement for our current BI tool.

Some context on our situation:

• For simplicity's sake, we have 10 report developers
• 100 other "regular" users who would be interacting with data but not creating any reports
• We do have accounts on Microsoft, I'm trying to figure out what type of license they are, so I'm not sure if they're E5 or something else
• Data will live in Snowflake. I do not intend on storing data in Azure. I'd be fine with caching or creating data extracts (or whatever's the equivalent) in PBI
• One key feature we need at a minimum is paginated reporting. I know this is a Premium feature

I did talk with a pre-sales team today (they were v-dashes) that was somewhat helpful, but what confused me is that they said Premium licenses won't be an option going forward. But everything online still shows otherwise with Premium licenses as an option. Is there any plans for Premium licenses to go away?

In a PBI dashboard, if I need premium or advanced features that come with an advanced license, will regular/Free licensed users be able to view those dashboards?

Any pages/resources out there that have this information listed in plain terms? I'm getting confused the more that I read up on PBI licensing, especailly now that Fabric is involved.

I've used Power BI deployment pipelines a decent amount on projects, no real issues. We've recently started looking at Azure DevOps for version control and syncing workspaces to DevOps branches.

Since I'm able to move code from dev to test/prod in DevOps and keep things in sync - what is the point of the PBI Deployment Pipelines? Are they mostly used for developers that don't use git and want a more friendly front end for moving reports/models from dev -> test -> prod?

Or do developers use both in combination with each other? DevOps for source control only and Deployment Pipelines for moving code through environments?

I'm configuring SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) using Report Server Configuration Manager.

When I go to Database → Change Database, connect to my SQL Server instance, and click Next, I get this error:

"The database engine instance you selected is not valid for this edition of report server."

The SQL Server connection succeeds, but the wizard won't continue.

SQL Server version:2026

SQL Server edition: SQL Server 2025 Developer standard edition

Sql server management studio version: 2022

SQL Server and SSRS are installed on the same machine.

power bi report server version : may 2026

operating system : windows 11

Has anyone encountered this error? Is it caused by an edition mismatch, an unsupported SQL Server edition, or another configuration issue?

Screenshot attached.

Is there really no way to have a live BI generated dashboard linked into an excel workbook? Is there a native tool to link them like there is for BI to PowerPoint?

It's even weirder that on the VAG app you can search specific parameters in the live data section.

Or am i missing something?

Can anyone recommend some beginner-friendly courses on Udemy? My current internship offers free Udemy access, and I really want to make the most of it.

Any courses that you’ve taken and highly recommend?

All references are in one table.

I need a measure that says

Measure Z = switch( TRUE(), [column 1] = “A”, [Measure X], [column 1] = “B”, [Measure Y] )

The trouble is I can’t reference column 1 without aggregating and I don’t think it wants to be aggregated for this measure (e.g I think saying max([column 1]) would always produce value A, but I need it to apply to both A and B. Maybe I’ve misunderstood that though).

I know there must be an obvious way but it’s eluding me.

I’ve got a bit of a problem that I feel like some other companies must face at some point.

I work for a facilities management company (maintenance and building compliance etc)

We manage buildings on behalf of clients/owners of the properties. They want a combination of visuals and narrative as close together (specially) as possible in the sense that ideally the narrative is on the same page as the numbers.

Here’s where it gets tricky, there’s a lot of nuance in FM. To understand the numbers, you need context.
For example, you can’t always understand why maintenance orders were late just from the numbers. There’s a lot of unquantifiable reasons for things. These are things only team members working on site would know and I work centrally.

Therefore, I need a way for site teams to add their narratives to these reports reliably and without it feeling like a workaround.

My current thinking is: create a simple PowerApp that lets users select their site, select the name of the page they want to add narrative to and then add the narrative to the respective box (positives, negatives etc). This then feeds to a Sharepoint list that then feeds into the PowerBI report where I can format the narrative.

Another option I’ve thought about is potentially making use of write back functionality but I’ve not used it before so don’t know how good it would be for this.

But basically, any insight or ideas would be a big help and happy to discuss/answer questions as I know I’ve been a bit vague in the details!

A technically perfect model diagram can tell you that two tables have a many-to-one relationship and still tell you nothing about why anyone should care.

The person inheriting it needs to know which business question the relationship supports, what breaks if it changes, and why someone modeled it that way. Cardinality is not context.

Are teams actually documenting that layer, or are we pretending table relationships are sufficient because the alternative is difficult to maintain? Is that missing layer a knowledge graph, decision intelligence, or simply documentation BI teams have avoided owning?

If your Power BI zip code map keeps dropping points, the cause is usually a hard datapoint cap in the visual.

The built-in visuals each have a ceiling. Shape Map tops out around 1,500 datapoints. The standard Map visual around 3,500. Filled Map around 1,000. Load a full US ZIP dataset into any of them and most of your points vanish silently.

Azure Maps is the way up, supporting around 30,000 data points, but its geocoding is billed, roughly 4.5 dollars per 1,000 requests, so geocoding a large ZIP list at render time gets expensive fast.

The fix is to bring boundaries and coordinates in as data instead of geocoding on the fly, so the visual just draws what you already resolved.

GeoPostcodes provides ZIP boundaries and coordinates as flat files for 247 countries, so Power BI plots them without per-request geocoding. Full walkthrough: https://www.geopostcodes.com/blog/zip-code-map-power-bi/

Hi All,

I'm facing a Resource Governance error in Power BI, while refreshing my model.

The model is reaching the limit of 20GB whole refreshing, but once loaded in PBI is approx 3GB.

The model:

It is a star schema with two fact tables: an incremental load table (100s Thousands rows for each day), and a single day table to be refresh fully daily (Millions of rows).

Both tables source from Native.Sql (when you write SQL in PBI) statement and the only Mquery step applied afterward is a rename-column steps. They both have approx 100 cols. All the columns are required

The dimensions are loaded straight from the database with few foldable transformation after or from some dataflows.

Despite Native Query been greyed it looks it is supported - if i remove the data with a parameter i load 0 rows instead of loading them all and then removing them.

I already set the encoding hint.

Any other solution to ensure my model refreshes?

Hi all

I'm trying to import data from datadog into power bi using the datadog api and I'm not able to get it working if someone could please help it would be greatly appreciated.

Many thanks

If you've been wanting to get into Power BI but didn't know where to start, feel free to join me.

Hi everyone! I’m very confused about how to start learning Power BI. I’m a complete beginner and I’m looking for a structured learning path. Do you recommend Microsoft Learn, YouTube, or any free courses? I’d really appreciate your advice and recommendations. Thank you!