Microsoft's Releases Power BI Report Server Software

Microsoft's latest released Power BI Report Servers now allows organizations to host their own reports in house rather than on Microsoft's cloud.

The in house Power BI software from Microsoft allows businesses to store and distribute reports generated by the cloud-based Power BI business intelligence and analytics application on-premises rather than on Microsoft's cloud.

The August 2017 preview version of the software built on the ability to use information from SQL Server Analysis Services data sources as the basis of those reports, extending support to all the data sources supported by Power BI.

In the official release of Power BI Report Server, end users can now set the data refresh schedules on reports that require connections to other systems to deliver business insights.

Users can even set multiple refresh schedules for each report, enabling even more control around how often users update their data. Microsoft has also increased the file size limit of file uploads used for the data refresh process to 2Gigabyte.

For users looking to create reports using live source data, Microsoft has added Direct Query support. This feature currently supports SQL Server, Azure SQL Database, Oracle, SAP HANA and SAP BW [Business Warehouse] and Teradata.

Developers can now use the REST API for Power BI Report server to extend the software's capabilities. The API, a successor to ReportingService2010 SOAP API, has been extended to support the variety of report types in supported in the new software.

Microsoft is also working to build on Power BI's "viral" growth to help businesses instill a "data culture" within their organizations. More than 11.5 million data models are hosted on the service, with an estimated 30,000 being added daily, according to the Microsoft's figures. Power BI also handles two million report and dashboard queries per hour.