The traditional model for Power BI is to pay per user, but what if you want to use the reports in your web app and don’t know who all the users would be? In this episode the team explores Power BI Embedded — how it differs from the traditional service, what you need to set it up, and some reasons why you might explore this option over the others.
Episode Quotes
“If you’re just looking to slap a Power BI report somewhere, and you have the licenses for your users, there’s a bunch of ways that already exist, that don’t involve all this work. Power BI Embedded is for custom application development, primarily.”
“You do need somebody, if you’re going to go down this road, that is a web developer/some kind of developer, to be able to make it work.”
“If you’re a software vendor, Power BI Embedded’s worth looking at. If you’re not a software vendor, it’s probably not the right solution for you.”
Listen to Learn
00:38 Intro to the topic
01:08 Compañero Shout-Outs
01:27 What Have I Learned
03:11 You can embed Power BI without using Embedded
05:32 What is an ISV?
06:40 How licensing/pricing works with Embedded, comparisons
10:28 The rough order of magnitude in price and why people get the higher SKUs
12:55 Nothing changes from a strictly BI developer perspective
14:02 Testing or proof of concept and security issues
17:29 Security! Power BI Embedded and users – it’s very different than what you’re used to
19:27 Support and languages in Power BI Embedded
20:24 Power BI Embedded Playground – go play!
20:57 Other scenarios where Power BI Embedded might make sense
22:30 Other supported toolkits with Power BI Embedded
23:57 What about quick links in paginated reports within an application?
25:19 Explanation of iframes and when you have to use them
27:36 What about non-vendors? What should they use?
29:19 Closing Thoughts
Credits
“Happy Rock” for What Have I Learned by https://www.bensound.com
*Untranscribed introduction*
Carlos: Compañeros, welcome to another edition of the SQL Data Partners Podcast! I am Carlos L Chacon, your host, and I am joined today by Angela Henry.
Angela: Hello.
Carlos: Eugene Meidinger.
Eugene: Howdy.
Carlos: And Kevin Feasel.
Kevin: I deny everything.
Carlos: So our topic today, in continuing with our Power BI topics, we’re going to be talking about Power BI Embedded, and we’ll set the stage for what that looks like, under what circumstances you might want to be looking at that, but that ultimately is our topic today.
Before we do that, I have a couple of shout-outs. I want to give a shout-out to Craig Anderson from EMPS software. Daniel Bartley has an idea, he wants us to talk about Azure Data Factory, and then Luis Fernando Lozano. So thanks, thanks guys for connecting and catching up with us. We do appreciate it.
For the What Have I Learned section, now what’s old is new again. Apparently, we’ve chatted about this in the past, but it is new for some of us, still, and something about Notepad having an increased functionality, so here we go.
Angela: Yeah, I missed the episode where you all were talking about the new functionality in Notepad, but I discovered it while I was over in Raleigh talking, and Notepad, when you open it up, you can actually zoom in just using your “ctrl plus”, and zoom out “ctrl minus”, now. Very handy. You can make it super tiny or you can make it super big.
Kevin: It also handles UNIX line feed, instead of just Windows carriage return line feed.
Eugene: Oh, about time.
Angela: Nice.
Kevin: That’s a positive thing, but still, I kind of still want edit.com, so Notepad was a little bit edgy for me. I’m not sure if I’m ready for new Notepad.
Carlos: Well, there you go. So what’s old is new again, compañeros. Okay, and so for today’s show notes, sqldatapartners.com/powerbi or sqldatapartners.com/160, because this is episode 160, as it turns out. Interesting.
Angela: It’s amazing how that works.
Carlos: That’s right, every time, it just gets higher and higher, right?
Kevin: It’s like a monotonically increasing function.
Eugene: Oh, geez, I knew you were going to say that. I literally had the word in my head.
Carlos: And here I was thinking identity column, but you know, hey, you know, whatever.
Kevin: For the SQL Data Partners bingo card, someone just got a sweet, sweet piece, right there.
Carlos: It’s probably worth mentioning, setting the stage, here, that if you don’t know already, you can interact with Power BI. I want to say interact. Apply, implement, maybe, implement Power BI in more than one way, and Power BI Embedded is one of those options. And so now I’m going to let those who are smarter than I, about this topic, kind of take us through what that means.
Eugene: Well, we should probably disclaim that you can embed Power BI without using Power BI Embedded. The naming gets kind of goofy real quick, because there’s a bunch of different ways to, if you just have a website and you just want to slap Power BI in it, you can do that really easily. We’ve had Publish to web for a while, which makes your data public, but it doesn’t cost anything, so if you’re a non-profit and you just want a dashboard that shows your KPIs, you can do that easily.
Carlos: I see.
Eugene: We’ve had Office 365 embedding for a while, so if you want to put in SharePoint Online or Microsoft teams, we’ve had that for a decent while. And they just recently pushed out Secure Embedding, which is similar to Publish to web, but people actually have to have a log-in. So now you can put it on your intranet without using Publish to web and opening up all your data to everyone by accident.
Kevin: Right, Publish to web basically is I’ve got a link, if I know what the URL is, I can get to your data.
Eugene: Yeah, security through obscurity, tell you what. Well, I’ve had multiple people be like, “well, if I put it on my SharePoint, then you have to log-in to get into the SharePoint, so it’s fine.” It’s like, “well, yeah, but if that employee leaves the company and they still have the link, they can access the data, so don’t do that.
Angela: You’re such a spoiler.
Eugene: Yeah, I know. Well, they recently released Secure Embedding, so it’s like Publish to web but actually secure. So if you’re just looking to slap a Power BI report somewhere, and you have the licenses for your users, there’s a bunch of ways that already exist, that don’t involve all this work. Power BI Embedded is for custom application development, primarily, and that’s kind of the big difference. So if you’re an ISV or if you’re a big enough enterprise that you want to put this into your own web application, then Power BI Embedded starts to make sense.
Angela: So, what is ISV?
Eugene: It’s a dumb acronym, too, because it just means “not Microsoft”. No, that’s fair. ISV stands for Independent Software Vendor, and like I said, it’s a dumb acronym, because the Independent stands for “not Microsoft”, because you have this whole idea with the Microsoft ecosystem that there’s everything that Microsoft makes and then there’s like these little fiefdoms around it of anyone else who dares to make software that works with their programs, but the idea is anyone who’s a commercial application vendor of any sort. If you’re making applications that people outside your organization are going to be using, then this is something that makes sense. So here in the Pittsburgh-ish area, there’s, shoot, I think it’s Digital Dimensions Incorporated or something like that, I forget the exact name, but they do organizational psychology kind of stuff. So if you’ve ever had an online application, and then they ask you to look at what looks like an IQ test, it’s probably them that made that, and they’re using Power BI Embedded to be able to service reports for their customers and that sort of thing.
Angela: So as somebody who, it would be like a customer of them, so do I have to have a Power BI license as a customer?
Eugene: It’s interesting, there’s two different roads you can go down. There’s this whole app owns data and user owns data. We’ll come back to the user-owns data, but the app owns data, the customer doesn’t have to have a license at all. They don’t even have to have a Power BI account. They just need some sort of user name and log-in for your application, and your application’s going to pass along some of that information. But as the vendor, you need licensing, and it’s interesting because normal Power BI licensing, people are used to the $10 a month buffet model, where you just pay $10 per month, per user, and that’s it. With Embedded, you’re paying for capacity, so the way I like to describe it is instead of buying people bus tickets, you just bought a bus and now you can throw as many people on there as you want, but if you overcrowd the bus, you’re going to get the ramifications you would expect. And so, what’s going to go on is if you’re using Power BI Embedded, you’re going to be going with the A level SKU, which I believe stands for Azure, and unlike some of the other Power BI Premium SKUs, you can pause this, you can easily ramp this up and down without a lot of trouble and you’re paying per minute and your commitment is on a monthly basis or something like that. Whereas, some of the other Power BI Premium SKUs, you’re paying per month and you’re making this annual commitment. So it’s a much bigger commitment, normally, but yeah, you’re going to look at the A SKU and that starts as low as, I think a few hundred dollars per month.
Angela: Great, so if you just wanted to kind of test it out or kick the tires, it’s definitely the way to go?
Eugene: Yeah, and you can do that testing pretty cheaply, because you can pause it. I’ve done that before, when I’ve been able to spin it up for just 20 minutes, and didn’t get some huge bill, like you might with other systems, like if you’ve ever spun up a Hadoop cluster in Azure and then forgot to delete everything, then you know what I’m talking about, where you have to be careful sometimes.
Kevin: And that $250 trial credit lasts about a weekend with a default HD Insight cluster.
Eugene: I believe it.
Kevin: Ask me how I know.
Carlos: I guess we’ve talked about buying the bus, so the A SKUs also have this idea of, so the number of times you can refresh? You’re actually allocating up to that number, so whether or not you use all of them, it doesn’t matter, you’re still paying. So nobody could go visit your reports and you’d still be paying for A SKUs?
Eugene: Yeah, so it’s interesting. I want to say two years ago, when this was in beta they did have a model closer to what you’re talking about, where you’re paying for render and it turns out that the Independent Software Vendors, or just software vendors didn’t like that because their billing was unpredictable. Because it’s hard to predict what the usage is going to be. So yeah, you’re paying for capacity, and it’s interesting, because from what I understand, the A0 through 3 level SKUs, you’re technically still buying shared capacity, and it’s once you get to 4 through 8 that you’re actually basically paying for an independent virtual machine and all of that. But yeah, you’re just paying for capacity, so if that bus just sits in the parking lot and nobody’s using it, you’re still paying for it. You’re still paying that lease.
Angela: Interesting. So, if you only have 3 customers, and you buy an A3 SKU and they only use it twice a month, that’s probably not the best use of an A3 SKU, is that correct?
Eugene: Yeah, yeah, definitely. And it’s interesting, we had a user group meeting about this last week, and one of the things is that they were getting better about the usage monitoring, but it’s still, from what it sounded like, from people who have been using this, it’s still a little bit rough, so it can be hard sometimes to figure out, “okay, what’s my right level of usage?” But I would definitely, unless you have a sizeable existing customer base, I would definitely start at zero and work your way up.
Kevin: So, without this being a pop quiz, what’s the rough order of magnitude in price, when you’re talking about these different SKUs, like A0 through A3 or A4 through A8?
Eugene: Yeah, going off the top of my head, I’m sure someone can pull up a browser. From what I remember, I think A0 is somewhere around $500 a month, and I’m pretty confident that A8 is $23,000 per month. So, once you get around A4, that’s pretty comparable as if you were starting with the Premium P1 level.
Angela: Okay, what’s to keep you from buying this A0 and using it as much as what an A8 would be? Do they have a mechanism in place to keep you from doing that?
Eugene: Well, there’s two things, Carlos had mentioned that there’s a set number of renders that they mentioned. I don’t know if that’s a hard limit, or if that’s just how much they expect to be able to support it. But I mean, at a certain point, it’s as if you were trying to have a 100GB database on 4gigs of RAM for SQL Server. I mean, at a certain point, you’re just over-provisioned. But no, I don’t know off the top of my head what happens if you try to go past those limits.
Angela: Interesting.
Eugene: Yeah, definitely, and it’s interesting, the idea of trying to figure out, “okay, well, how do we provision the right amount?” The nice thing, though, is like I said, it’s really easy to pause it, it’s really easy to just turn the knob, like a lot of other things in Azure. So at least in that regard, you’re not just locking yourself into one level.
Angela: Okay, so if you were just going to do this to spin it up and kick the tires, you would definitely want to go with the A0?
Eugene: Yeah, I would think so. The one exception is if you’re looking to use some of the features that are like Premium level only, so like paginated reports as an example. And I just know a little bit about this, but there’s certain features that only really work on like that P1-type level or require that kind of independent infrastructure, where you have your own virtual machine. So my understanding is some of the stuff that you would normally only be able to get with the P levels, you’re going to be paying a similar amount. But for just seeing how Embedded works, yeah, I would set up an A0 and then turn it off and just have it on whenever you need to test it. And in fact, I think you can do a little bit of testing, actually, without even setting up the capacity, if I remember. So if you’re doing pure, pure testing, from what I remember, I think you can use your Power BI Pro account as the master account for your application for a certain number of renders before it says, “hey, you need to stop and pay for some actual capacity.”
Angela: Give us some money.
Eugene: Yeah, exactly.
Carlos: Okay, so the other piece of Power BI Embedded, you were talking about custom apps, so SSAS apps or other folks that are creating applications. So they then have to tie into the report, the Power BI, and so from a Power BI development perspective, not too much changes there, right? I mean, you’re still working in Power BI Desktop, you’re still going to publish to a workspace, you’ve got your data model, all of that stuff. All of that’s still the same?
Eugene: Yeah, from a BI perspective, nothing really changes. It’s the same deployment, same management team governance, all that kind of stuff. What changes is just all the work that needs to be done from the presentation layer. But yeah, so if you think that, “okay, I’ve got a BI developer and I’ve got a web developer,” suddenly the web developer has a lot more work to do, and you’re going to have to talk with infrastructure to get certain permissions set up in Azure Active Directory and to set up a service account, all that kind of stuff. But you know, if you have someone who’s just doing BI, their world doesn’t change at all.
Angela: So typically, the people who are developing these Power BI reports and dashboards and whatnot, they have no web or application development experience. So what I hear you saying is that you really do need somebody if you’re going to go down this road that is a web developer/some kind of developer, to be able to make it work?
Eugene: Yeah, if you’re looking to do just a minimum proof of concept or something like that, you can get by decently far. But the two places where it becomes an immediate issue is security and user interface. Because what happens is, if you just want to try it out, you can go on GitHub and Microsoft has demo code and you can just get it running and slap your report in an iframe and call it a day. But at that point, you’re not doing much better than Publish to web or Secure Embedding or any of that kind of stuff. And in addition to that, if you just do that, if you just run the demo, there’s no security that’s being applied. It’s basically you just have the regular privileges, because the thing is, when you’re embedding it, when you’re just doing the proof of concept, like you grab the code from GitHub, it’s running as whatever master user you’ve set. And if you go through the instructions from Microsoft, you’ve given that master user full privileges to all of the content in Power BI. So if you just do a proof of concept, it’s basically the equivalent of using the SA account for SQL.
Angela: Oh, probably not a good idea.
Eugene: No, I’ve done that at my last job, but I was young and naïve and didn’t know what I was doing. There’s a number of SSRS reports that are running as SA at my former employer, and it’s just part of the carnage I left.
Angela: Oh, that was you who did that.
Eugene: Yeah, that’s right. If you’re cleaning something up, it might have been me.
Carlos: Well, that’s a great example of having to understand what those pieces are, because to your point, they’re providing the documentation, “hey, here’s how you set it up,” and they’re kind of leading you towards, “hey, give us the keys to the kingdom.”
Eugene: Right, what you’re basically doing is creating a Power BI content admin and then tying it to your application. So the question then becomes, okay, what’s the security model for your application? Because the thing is, your application is now acting as an intermediary. And so if you’re not careful, now you’re opening yourself up to security issues or data exfiltration issues or whatever. So if you just want to do a proof of concept and download the GitHub code, and then really all you have to do is a couple changes in Azure Active Directory and fill in some blanks in the web.config file. If you’re just doing testing, just doing proof of concept, it’s really easy to get set up if you just through the docs. But yeah, now you need some developer expertise, because one, “okay, how are your users logging in?” and you need to pass that information along. And now you need to set up row level security, the same that you would in the Power BI service normally. But then, there’s the whole UI thing, because it’s not like they’re getting the powerbi.com experience. What it’s like is just like Publish to web where you’ve just slapped a report inside an iframe and you’re going to need some sort of chrome around all that for people to be able to navigate or do whatever. And that’s just getting it all working in a robust manner. You haven’t even gotten to the part where, “oh, maybe we want to extend it.” So, let’s say that you’re doing reporting for some kind of business or something like that, maybe people want to be able to right click on this table for invoices, and actually go to a different application that shows them the invoice detail, or something like that. And you can do that with Power BI Embedded. You can extend the context menus, so that someone can right click on a thing, and now they have extra buttons or what have you, but that all requires developer expertise.
Kevin: So on that security topic, let’s say that I do have role-based access control in my application, how would that translate into working with Power BI Embedded?
Eugene: That’s a good question. So again, just to kind of reiterate the point, your application doesn’t need to know anything about users in Azure Active Directory, and the Power BI service doesn’t know anything directly about the users in your application. There’s this separation here, where you’re not just saying, “okay, [email protected]” or whatever. So what’s going on is your user logs into the application, and then whenever your application is making the call to the Power BI service saying, “hey, give me this report,” what it’s passing along is what roles the user falls in and what their user name, so to speak, is in your application. From that point, it’s just basic row level security, where you’ve got some security roles set up on the Power BI data set and it’s doing the filtering there. So, an example is, maybe a role is geography-based, so LATAM, EMEA, APAC, that sort of thing, and so your application might say, “okay, this user that I’m rendering the report for, they’re in the APAC role, so only show them data from Asia,” that sort of thing. So your application, when it’s making the API call, saying, “okay, here’s their username, here’s their role, but the user name is whatever,” so you could put in a company ID or something like that. It’s not going to be the normal user principle name that we’re used to from Azure Active Directory.
Angela: Right, because they don’t have an account, right?
Eugene: Exactly, and that’s a mental leap that I think can be hard for people, because this is very, very different than any of the other ways that you normally interact with Power BI. Power BI is joined at the hip with Azure Active Directory in most cases, and so it’s always assumed that you’ve got some Office 365 account that people are using to access the content. This is the one situation where it’s just completely different.
Kevin: Yeah, makes sense.
Carlos: Now, what are the normal ways in which we’re connecting to Power BI? From a language perspective, or from a support perspective, are there any limitations, there?
Eugene: I know that there’s support for JavaScript, and I know there’s support for C#. I don’t know much beyond that, but generally speaking, if you’re doing any kind of web development, you’re going to be using JavaScript, so it shouldn’t be a big issue, there.
Carlos: A big stretch? I was going to say, looking at the documentation, those are the only two, like SDKs that they have.
Angela: So you mean my classic ASP app that I have isn’t going to work?
Eugene: You’re giving me war flashbacks to my prior job. We had a business-to-business storefront written in classic ASP that I had to support. It had JavaScript, though. It had old JavaScript, but you might be able to get it working if you just–
Angela: If I hold my mouth just right and only do it on Tuesdays at three?
Eugene: Yeah, when the moon’s waxing gibbous in Africa? Yeah. Oh, I was going to say, something we should mention, and we can put it in the show notes is the Microsoft Power BI Embedded Playground. So Microsoft has a site where you can play around with some of the code and see some of the things that you can do without having to spin up any capacity or set up your own reports or anything like that. So I think that will be a good resource for people to be able to play around.
Angela: Yeah, it’s actually really cool. You can go out there and you can pick whether you want to see a sample report or dashboard or whatever, and then it’ll actually show you the code that it generates, and all of the tokens and you can interact with it. It’s very cool.
Carlos: We talked about, the SSAS apps, so we want to integrate that into our application. Are there other scenarios where Power BI Embedded might make more sense over traditional offerings, like Power BI service?
Eugene: Yeah, so there’s really only two other scenarios that come to my mind. One is if you’re looking for some way to take advantage of Power BI Premium or something like that, and you want to lean towards more of a capacity-based licensing. But still, you can get a lot of that with just the regular experience and having people go to powerbi.com, that sort of thing. And then the other thing I can think of is if you have some sort of internal application that you want to be able to embed these reports into. But honestly, at this point, in most cases, the offering’s pretty robust. Now, it’s not always coherent. I say that Microsoft decided to do this whole Agile, minimum viable product kind of thing, and they said, “well, we need something in the cloud, because that’s where we make all our money, and we need something to kill Tableau, and we’re just going to do these two-week sprints until we get a product.” And so, as a result, you’ve got this really scattershot list of different deployment methods. Like, I have a course on Pluralsight on deploying Power BI and there’s nine different modules, because there’s nine different ways to do it. But in terms of what your needs are, especially with Secure Embedding being a thing for intranets, now, I think in probably 90% to 95% of the cases, you’re going to be perfectly fine with one of the normal ways of deploying Power BI. Especially if you’re talking internal, most cases you’re not going to need to look at Power BI Embedded.
Kevin: Quickly back on the topic of supported toolkits, Eugene mentioned C#, it is a .NET API, so you can use F# with it. You can install it using Paket.
Angela: You could do it, Kevin.
Eugene: If you’re the one soul who’s using F# for web development. I saw that there was a library, I think it’s called Yesod or something like that, for doing web development in Haskell. Not P, Paskell, but H, Haskell.
Kevin: Yeah, oh yeah, Haskell, there are a fair number of Haskell web libraries.
Eugene: Right, I’m surprised that it allows any side effects. It seems like the kind of, what is it, (?) system where it’s just stuck in its own head and doesn’t want to interact with the world, kind of language. But yeah, if you’re the one dude or gal that’s doing web development in F#, you’re in luck.
Kevin: I will defend those people using tooling. I know some of those people. There’s more than one.
Eugene: You’re even friends with some of those people.
Kevin: But there’s also a REST API for any other languages outside of JavaScript or .NET, so if you want to write Java code and access this, you can hit the REST API.
Carlos: Okay, well, then there you go.
Kevin: But F# is obviously the language you want to use.
Angela: Obviously.
Carlos: Didn’t seem that obvious to me, but I’ll take your word for it.
Kevin: Something something, knuckle-dragging Neanderthal something something?
Carlos: Something something, yes, that’s right. To this knuckle-dragging Neanderthal, it didn’t seem like the first choice.
Kevin: Are you able, also, to have links going to different pages on paginated reports? Within my application, I mean?
Eugene: You mean, are you able to embed paginated reports in your application or what?
Kevin: So let’s say you have a paginated report. You’ve paid for whatever Premium level you need to, and on my app, I’ve got the iframe that has that Power BI Embedded report. On my app itself, not within Power BI, maybe I want to have a couple of quick links that say, “well, go to page number 3 on this,” or “go to the page that’s quarterly reporting” or whatever.
Eugene: Gotcha. So, what I know offhand, one I don’t know if the SSRS-style paginated reports are supported yet in Power BI Embedded, but let’s just say that you want to go to a specific tab on a regular Power BI report. I’m pretty sure you can do that. I know for sure that it has support for these JavaScript events, so that if you click a button you can have it do something on the actual iframe of the Power BI report. Like something I know that is supported is that you can apply a filter, for example.
Angela: Yeah, you can navigate to specific pages in your Power BI report. That’s a part of the REST API.
Kevin: Okay, so if I have a nice map of the world.
Eugene: Yeah, exactly, you can control a lot of interactivity outside of that iframe boundary, but still within your application, for sure.
Kevin: Alright, makes sense.
Angela: So, you keep saying iframe. So as somebody who is not a web person, I stopped being an application developer when the internet became a thing, so does it have to be an iframe, and what is an iframe? I don’t have an iframe. I have an iPhone. Is that the same thing?
Eugene: The iframe was inside of you the whole time, Angela, you just had to believe.
Angela: I just had to believe.
Eugene: Yeah, so I’m certainly no web expert, but iframe stands for Inline Frame, and I’m pretty sure you have to do it that way because I think everything’s pointing to powerbi.com or something along those lines. But basically, what you’re doing is you’re embedding one website inside of another website. So I don’t think that there’s any way that you can just have the report in your regular HTML code without doing it this way. What I do know for sure is that the other ways of embedding do the same thing. So if you’re doing Publish to web or you’re doing Secure Embedding, I think the only exception is the Office 365 stuff where you’re using a SharePoint web part and that sort of thing. But that’s all stuff that Microsoft owns, so it’s a little bit easier for them to do that. So yeah, I think you’re going to have to go that route, but it’s not particularly difficult. I mean, literally, for Publish to web, you’re just copying three lines of HTML. It’s not anything burdensome to set up.
Angela: Okay, so it’s just HTML code, a tag in HTMLs with an iframe in it?
Eugene: Yeah, it’s literally just the tag, an HTML tag.
Kevin: Right, it’s akin to, say when you’re blogging, you drop a link to Wikipedia in and you get a one box entry in WordPress, where they’re converting that link into an iframe that displays a portion of a little bit of data. All it is, is just a document within your HTML document.
Angela: I always thought it was magic.
Eugene: Or, it’s like whenever you have an Excel document in your Word document and you’re like, “why did you do this?”
Kevin: And you drop both of those into PowerPoint.
Carlos: There you go, now we’re cooking with gas. Let’s see how many Microsoft applications we can bundle in one item.
Kevin: All of that’s connected through InfoPath. Is it too soon for InfoPath jokes?
Angela: What?
Carlos: Yes. Okay. We have anything else we need to talk about?
Eugene: I think if you’re a software vendor, Power BI Embedded’s worth looking at. If you’re not a software vendor, it’s probably not the right solution for you.
Kevin: Choose one of the other fourteen solutions.
Eugene: Yes.
Angela: That would make sense. That makes sense.
Kevin: Yeah, so for non-vendors, would Secure Embedded be the best option? Notice me forcing Eugene into selecting one.
Eugene: No, yeah, I mean, it’s not a Sophie’s Choice kind of situation, so I’m okay with it.
Kevin: No, I’m going to make you kill one of your babies.
Eugene: Oh, no! Well, I think in most cases, people just want to be able to slap a Power BI report in their intranet or some kind of website or something, and so for that, Secure Embedded is the way to go, because it works with regular Pro licensing. It works if you’re doing capacity-based licensing with Power BI Premium, and it’s super simple to do because you’re just sticking an inline frame with a little bit of code in your intranet or website or whatever. So you just go to whoever manages that and say, “here, stick this random HTML tag that I got. Don’t ask any questions. Just put it in there.”
Carlos: Just put it in.
Eugene: Yeah, exactly, it’ll be fine. So yeah, if you don’t have a custom application that needs Power BI reports inside of it, if you just have an intranet, just use Secure Embedding. It’s really easy to use.
Angela: So what if I’m using Power BI Report Server and I want to let my customers see that? Can I use Embedded to do that?
Eugene: That’s a good question. I guess the true answer is, I don’t know. The better answer is that with Power BI Report Server, you can just slap on rs:embed or I forget exactly like web render, and it’ll show it without any of the chrome around it.
Kevin: Right, like Reporting Services.
Eugene: Exactly. Yeah, so if you have Power BI Report Server, I would just do that. Power BI Embedded, I would be very surprised if it allows you to do any of that, because it’s all in the cloud, it’s all Power BI service. Yeah, so I could maybe see something with the SDK, but I doubt it. If you’ve got Report Server, just add &rs:embed and call it a day.
Carlos: There you go. Thanks guys, for the great discussion and some insights there. I think that’s going to do it for today’s episode. Again, we’ll have some links to the Power BI Playground and to the licensing and whatnot up on the show notes at sqldatapartners.com/powerbi. And of course, we’re very interested in hearing from you, what you have to say, questions about this. You can reach out to us on various means of social media.
Angela: You can reach out to me on Twitter, I am sqlswimmer, or you can find me on LinkedIn at AngelaHenryDBA. And if you do choose to do LinkedIn, I don’t check it very frequently, so make sure you actually include a message, so I don’t know that you’re just some random person.
Carlos: Here, here. Go for it, Eugene.
Eugene: Alright, sorry, just trying to remember the order. You can find me on Twitter at sqlgene. I blog at sqlgene.com and I accidentally said my personal email in this podcast, so if you can find it, feel free to email me.
Kevin: And for me, you can reach me on Twitter at sophie’s choice.
Eugene: Terrible.
Carlos: Compañeros, I’d like to connect with you, if we haven’t already, on LinkedIn. I am at CarlosLChacon, and we’ll see you on the SQL Trail.
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