As I continue to explore and develop best practices for managing serious business-scale Power BI solutions, I’m having conversations with recognized community leaders. Last month I chatted with Ásgeir Gunnarsson on the SQL Train ride from Portland to PASS Summit in Seattle. Ásgeir is a data platform MVP and seasoned Business Intelligence expert from Reykjavik, Iceland who works as Chief Consultant for Datheos, a Microsoft-focused BI and Analytics consultancy in Copenhagen. He leads the Icelandic Power BI User Group and PASS Chapter.
He gave an inspiring presentation at Oregon SQL Saturday about Enterprise Power BI Development. You can view his presentation deck from the Schedule page here.
Ásgeir talked primarily about the development life cycle for for projects centered around Power BI, data and object governance. As I’ve mentioned in my earlier posts on this topic, the development experience for BI projects in general is different from application development and database projects and you cannot use the same management tools – at least not in the same way. He promoted using OneDrive for Business to manage version control.
He shared several excellent resources, many of which I either use or have evaluated, to help manage Power BI projects. The ALM Toolkit is a useful tool for comparing objects in great detail between two PBIX files. Ásgeir also show some efforts from community contributors to automate change-tracking file-level source control (which really made the point that it’s a difficult thing to do with Power BI). We know that Microsoft are working on an integrated release management solution for the Power BI service which may amend or replace the need for existing tools.
Guidance for publishing and management the life cycle for Power BI solutions included deployment automation using OneDrive and PowerShell. Using multiple workspaces for development, testing and pre-production; deployment can be managed using the Power BI REST APIs and PowerShell script, which is detailed in this tutorial. These PowerShell examples demonstrate how to clone workspace content, publish files and rebind data sources.
Regarding governance and security, he made reference to the extensive Microsoft whitepaper: Planning a Power BI Enterprise Deployment. He steps-through diagrams that help simplify each of the important processes and tasks for developing, deploying and managing Power BI solutions.
If you need to manage Power BI solutions, I encourage you to review his presentation and you can connect with Ásgeir on LinkedIn and Twitter.
