Power BI Analysis Services Connector Deep Dive

One of the most exciting features of the new Power BI Preview is the ability to connect live to Analysis Services tabular models that live on-premise though the SSAS connector. In this article we will show you step by step how to securely connect an on-premises Analysis Services Tabular mode instance to use it as a data source in the Power BI Preview. You can alternatively use a virtual environment in Azure (IaaS). The process is similar. Unlike caching the data in the Power BI service, with the new Analysis Services Connector you can connect from Power BI to your on-premises Analysis Services Tabular model & build dashboards, reports. The DAX queries issued by Power BI are sent to the Analysis Services Connector which in turn sends it to the tabular model. The DAX query is executed according to the role based permissions defined in the model. The connector will interactively query the on-premises cube to fetch the data using your Active Directory credentials. With this new option, you can continue to manage and secure your data on-premises, removing the need to have data reside in the cloud.