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Announcing the Upcoming Evolution of Power BI Premium to enterprise markets and beyond

Headshot of article author David Magar

Premium capacities are the best way your organization could leverage Power BI. They offer greater scale for any analytics project, unlock access to all features of Power BI including advanced AI and pixel perfect paginated reporting capabilities, provide free distribution and even licensing for on-premise usage. We have evolved the architecture with the 2nd generation of Power BI Premium.  With this, Gen 2 offers the below additional benefits:

  • Ability to license Premium per user in addition to by capacity. Read this blog post to get more details.
  • Enhanced performance on any capacity size, any time: Analytics operations will run up to 16X faster. Furthermore, operations will always perform at top speed and will not slow down when the load on the capacity approaches the capacity limits.
  • Even greater scale with:
    • No limits on refresh concurrency so you don’t have to track refresh schedule spacing
    • Fewer memory restrictions
    • Complete separation between report interaction and scheduled refreshes
  • Reimagined metrics with clear and normalized capacity utilization data that is only dependent on the analytics operations the capacity performs and not on its size, or level of load. With the new metrics, utilization analysis, budget planning, chargebacks and need to upgrade are clearly visible with built-in reporting
  • Autoscale providing the ability to automatically add 1 v-core at a time for 24 hr. periods when the load on the capacity exceeds its limits, thus preventing slowdowns caused by overload. V-cores are automatically removed when idle time is detected. Additional v-cores will be charged to your Azure subscription on a pay-as-you-go basis.
  • Significantly reduced management overhead, with proactive and configurable admin notifications about capacity utilization level and load increasing.

The 2nd generation of Power BI Premium capacities is now in a Private Preview program, that will be made publicly available in the next several weeks.
We encourage current customers using Power BI Premium capacities to request an invitation for the private preview program by submitting this form. Invitations are not guaranteed as slots are limited.

During the time of the public preview, customers will be able to use both 1st generation premium capacities and 2nd generation capacities at the same time. Including the ability to transition capacities back and forth between the two generations. After the GA of the 2nd generation of Power BI Premium capacities, all 1st generation capacities will automatically be upgraded to the 2nd generation.

Learn more about the benefits of the Gen 2 platform from this Ignite On-Demand session and stay tuned for more news as we make the preview of the 2nd generation of Power BI Premium capacities publicly available.