White papers for Power BI

White papers allow you to explore Power BI topics at a deeper level. Here you can find a list of available white papers for Power BI.

White paper Description Date
Power BI and Dataflows This white paper describes dataflows in technical detail, and describes the capabilities and initiatives behind dataflow features and functionality. November 2018
Power BI Premium Planning and Deployment The content of this white paper has been incorporated into general guidance. See the link for guidance and best practices for planning and deploying Premium capacity for well-defined workloads. March 2019
Capacity planning guidance for Power BI Report Server This paper aims to offer guidance on capacity planning for Power BI Report Server by sharing results of numerous load test executions of various workloads against a report server. March 2018
Security Provides a detailed explanation of security within Power BI. March 2019
Distribute Power BI content to external guest users using Microsoft Entra B2B This paper outlines how to distribute content to users outside the organization using the integration of Microsoft Entra business-to-business (Microsoft Entra B2B). March 2019
Advanced Analytics with Power BI Describes the advanced analytics capabilities of Power BI, including predictive analytics, custom visualizations, R integration, and data analysis expressions. February 2017
Bidirectional filtering Explains bidirectional cross-filtering in Power BI Desktop (the white paper also covers SQL Server Analysis Services 2016, both have the same behavior). July 2018
DirectQuery in SQL Server 2016 Analysis Services For SQL Server 2016, DirectQuery was redesigned for dramatically improved speed and performance, however, it is also now more complex to understand and implement. January 2017
Power BI and SAP BW This document describes how SAP customers can benefit from connecting Power BI to their existing SAP Business Warehouse (BW) systems. Updated in November 2019. November 2019
Securing the Tabular BI Semantic Model This paper introduces the security model for tabular BI semantic and Power BI. You will learn how to create roles, implement dynamic security, configure impersonation settings, manage roles, and choose a method for connecting to models that works in your network security context. April 2016
Power BI and GDPR This link takes you to the list of white papers on the Service Trust Portal, including the Microsoft Power BI GDPR white paper. April 2018
Power BI migration This link takes you to an article that describes how to migrate from other business intelligence tools to Power BI. September 2020

Note

If you’re interested in viewing or deleting personal data, please review Microsoft's guidance in the Windows Data Subject Requests for the GDPR site. If you’re looking for general information about GDPR, see the GDPR section of the Service Trust portal.

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