Today, let’s talk about Power BI Premium. Power BI Premium is an offering for Power BI. It’s an add-on for Power BI Pro. That means that you need to have a user with Power BI Pro in your organization. The reason for that is because all publishing of reports and creations of app workspaces, that’s all done with a user that has Pro.
So you can’t have Premium without having Pro. And that brings me to another item that I want to make sure you understand is that Premium is not something that you would assign to a user. It has nothing to do with the users themselves. Every user in your organization needs to have either a Free or a Pro license assigned to them in order to work with Power BI, in order to sign in and to use Power BI.
Premium is not something that you assign to users. So what exactly is Power BI Premium? Premium is really a way to have dedicated resources inside of your organization. Basically, think of it as having like a dedicated server for your workload.
This provides you with a set of resources that are dictated by the SKU that you purchase of Premium. And we’ll talk about that in a minute. But when you have this and you assign items to that Premium capacity, then you have those dedicated resources that you’re taking advantage of for your reports. Premium will also be a way for you to get other advantages as compared to the normal Power BI service. So an example of this is down the road you may see where you can have larger data set sizes than you can normally with Power BI. Right now, your data set size is limited to 1 GB.
That could be increased later on through having Premium in your organization. So I just mentioned Premium capacity. That’s a new term. Everything you have is in the context of what we call a capacity. So when you purchase Power BI Premium, you’re actually purchasing a Power BI Premium capacity node. So think of the capacity node as that’s the server that you’re buying. This is in contrast to the normal Power BI service where we call that Shared capacity. And so if you’re just a free or Pro user and you’re just using Power BI like normal, you’re in the Shared capacity model. And this means that you’re sharing the server, or the environment, with other users and possibly with other organizations that may be taking advantage of those resources to load balance. This is the Cloud after all.