Power BI On Premises Integration with Reporting Services Preview

Since the Reporting Services product team announced last year that it was their intention to provide an on premises deployment option for Power BI reports, there has been tremendous interest.  Despite their determination to provide clarity around their efforts , there has still been some speculation about how and when we’ll see this capability.  I don’t want to jump on the bandwagon and add to the rumors or debate the details.  The fact is that product leadership have been more than forthright about their progress and must work through the usual rigor of packaging and supporting a major feature addition when it is ready for release.

At the PASS Summit in Seattle a few weeks ago, Riccardo Muti and Chris Finlan announced that the team planned to release a new preview of the enhancements to SQL Server 2016 Reporting Services that could support Power BI reports hosted within the SSRS web portal.  Today, they are delivering the goods with an Azure virtual machine that we can use to preview these features.  Riccardo was very clear that the VM would be a very early preview and that the actual released product wouldn’t be announced until it was ready.  The question on the minds of several community leaders is whether these features will be available in some kind of update for SQL Server 2016 or whether it will be in the next version of SQL Server.  I checked with Riccardo Muti, Group Program Manager for SSRS and he says “We’re releasing Power BI reports in ‘SSRS vNext’ as part of the SQL Server vNext wave, but don’t assume ‘vNext’ must mean a couple of years.“ …and, “it’ll be here in 2017“.  Now we have a definitive answer.

Dan English posted about this today in an article titled On-Premise Power BI–A Microsoft Story.  I encourage you to read his entire post and understand his thoughts on the matter.  At the PASS Summit session, I had the impression that there would be an interim update for SQL Server 2016 but after reading a lengthy email thread today, that doesn’t seem to be the case.  My conclusion is that plans can change and there has not been on official announcement on the release plan.

The official announcement was posted today on the Reporting Services product team blog by Chris Finlan, titled Technical Preview of Power BI reports in SQL Server Reporting Services now available.  Chris told me about this plan a few weeks head of the announcement and said that they weighed their options carefully before they decided to go down this route.  The trade-off was that this decision would likely raise unanswered questions and speculation out in the community.  In the end, they decided it was best to err on the side of being open and transparent with their customers.

From Chris’ post on the team blog:

As we brainstormed creative ways to let people try this functionality as early as possible, we had three very specific goals we wanted to achieve:

• Provide access to the new functionality publicly as early as possible while ensuring the end-user experience was something you’d find valuable
• Create a self-contained experience and environment that allowed users of any skill level an easy way to get started
• In no way disrupt or delay the initial preview of a downloadable and installable version

By using the Azure Marketplace to distribute this early technical preview, we feel we have not only met those goals, but also established a repeatable way to distribute content in the future.  For users who would prefer to run this technical preview on an on-premises server, you are welcome to provision a virtual machine and then download the image as a .vhd file and use Hyper-V functionality to do so.

Read the entire post for more details and to learn how to obtain the preview.