It is really good news that Satya Nadella announced Power BI service will be available for free. I believe this is to compete with BI tools in the market and Microsoft seeks for wider range of customers.
From my point of view this is a great change, because as a BI Consultant I’ve worked with many BI tools in the market, and I always found Microsoft tools as one of the top BI tools, and I am proud to be part of the community to help spreading word about it.
The new pricing plan starts from free for 1 GB data user per month, and then there is a 9.99$ per month plan for 10GB user.
previously Microsoft Power BI plan was between 20$ to 52$ per month, and there was only a 25 trial days version of it for free;
I believe there will be more and more users for Power BI, as this is user friendly, self-service BI tool, with more features adding to it every month.
For those of you who are not familiar with Power BI; Power BI is cloud based Microsoft BI tool which offer data anlytics features even through self-service. It has 5 components;
- Power Query; to fetch the data from different data sets and sources, transform it and turn it to the required shape
- Power Pivot; to build an analytical model of the data, with calculated columns or measures, and hierarhcies based on the super fast xVelocity In-Memory engine
- Power View; to visualize data in an interactive mode with different charts and filtering features.
- Power Map; to build geo spatial data visualization in 3D mode with ability to build videos.
- Power Q&A; to answer natural language questions asked from data analyst or end user based on the model and charts provided.
If you want to learn more about Power BI, and also you are in Europe in 27th of Feb, come and join us in our Power BI Rookie to Rockstar full day training course, this will be held in Vienna and will be thought on English language;
http://rad.pasfu.com/index.php?/archives/185-Power-BI;-from-Rookie-to-Rockstar.html
Reza is author of more than 14 books on Microsoft Business Intelligence, most of these books are published under Power BI category. Among these are books such as Power BI DAX Simplified, Pro Power BI Architecture, Power BI from Rookie to Rock Star, Power Query books series, Row-Level Security in Power BI and etc.
He is an International Speaker in Microsoft Ignite, Microsoft Business Applications Summit, Data Insight Summit, PASS Summit, SQL Saturday and SQL user groups. And He is a Microsoft Certified Trainer.
Reza’s passion is to help you find the best data solution, he is Data enthusiast.
His articles on different aspects of technologies, especially on MS BI, can be found on his blog: https://radacad.com/blog.