Recommended architecture for Power BI and SQL server in a small charity

[JSV]

Hi,

Would anyone happen to know of a good source for best practices in Power BI integration architecture?

(I mean where Power BI fits into the picture rather than modelling within Power BI itself)

I've recently joined a small IT team and am trying to build reporting and analytics but my IT understanding is limited when it comes to servers and services (yes, I am an analyst and love data but the infrastructure supporting it is a somewhat mysterious to me). In my previous job, I was using data warehouse but the scale on my current data is comparatively small (most of the data lives in SQL server, o365 is widely used and scalability will likely be important faily soon).

I've tried looking around but this would be likely be responsibility of an architect in a bigger organisation so I am wondering if anyone knew of good source of information.

Thanks,

Jana

[Greg_Deckler]

Well, as with most things, it depends. I have seen Power BI tagged on to the end of a data and reporting architecture and I have seen Poewr BI be the data and reporting architecture. So, traditional modern data warehouse:

Source systems -> Azure Data Factory -> Azure Blob Storage -> DataBricks -> Azure SQL Data Warehouse -> Power BI Dataflows/Reports

or

Source Systems -> Power Query/Dataflows -> Power BI Datasets/Data Models -> Power BI Reports

Depends on your scale and budget what makes sense for you.