Migrating a tabular model and reconnecting Power BI

[Gregs138]

So I am not having this problem per se right now, but I could see this being a real scenario soon. 

Currenct Scenario:

Few Reports and dashboards that were built in PowerBI.com.

All connected to the same Tabular connector.

Everything is fine atm.

Then 20-30 users log on and need to upgrade hardware and/or move the tabular model to a new server.

If I just move the tabular model and reset up the connector, will the Power BI reports be able to find it?  Is there a way to edit connection information in an existing report?

[andre]

@Gregs138, I think this is a miss that needs to be addressed.  Right now AS based data sets are hard-wired into the physical instance which makes it difficult to promote things from Dev to Test to Prod.

Hopefully it will get addressed soon.

[meysun]

If you use the Power BI Desktop to author these reports connecting live to AS and publish it to Power BI Service, you should be able to change the server name from the Power BI Desktop tool.

[andre]

It works if you have a couple of users and they know what they are doing, but if we had hundreds of users with thousands of personalized dashboards and reports and we decided to move our AS with let's say Finance, Sales, HR, R&D, Planning, Pricing, Vendor Managmeent and a bunch of other models to a different IP address (or if we decided to move our models to a bunch of different servers because of model size growth) telling users to go ahead and change that in their Power BI Desktop to point to the new server and then redeploy everything would probably not be a good idea.

[Gregs138]

Andre, that is exactly my point.  with 3-10 users no big deal.  To scale this to an enterprise level  it certainly is a legitimate design problem.  I think my idea of "deploy the newest version of a content pack connected to the new tabular model on the new server hardware"  is a good work around if the situation were real today, but a model built in power BI should have some way to modify/alter the data connection just like the desktop designer does imo.

[Seth_C_Bauer]

Hey Greg,

Not a definitive answer here, but we just had to go through messing around with the tabular model today as we had a POC set up and the client asked to us to delete all data prior to the engagement. With the caveat of, "please keep the reports". 

So, I'll start with our current solution, then do a high level of what we tested.

Solution: Re-create the reports in PBI Desktop to have a hard copy. The removal of the AS connector didn't seem to delete the reports in PBI Desktop, and we were able to re-connect. (We did not cover every single scenerio, so be cautious). My "for sure" solution is I backed up the reports by screen shoting them all. - I really, really don't like this solution.

Scenerio/Testing: (we tested on a different AS model)

All POC reports were created in PowerBI.com using the SSAS connector.

All testing we did around removing the AS tabular model and trying to reconnect to powerbi.com failed. The service was never able to resolve the reports to the existing connection so there was no way to recover the reports., we had to create another dataset which doesn't help at all. Service = dead end currently.

We created a connection to the SSAS model in the PBI Desktop, created reports, saved the file. removed the model (detached-offlined), opened the desktop designer (which failed as expected) closed it, put the model back, opened the designer and it resolved with the reports coming back.

What I fear here, and we didn't test, is in the future the server will be different when we turn on the AS instance in the future, so i don't know if my reports will resolve - thus the screenshots. It may just be caching the connection in the Desktop and reconnecting differently.

Hope this helps, although I don't see a clear answer to this right now.

[Gregs138]

Hey Eno, yes I can absolutely see what you are saying and my thoughts went in the same direction.  I have not had time to test the "problem" by moving it via test environement etc.  But I have come up with the solution that "well hey just release a new content pack and then the old one is obsolete"

I guess you could kind of manage it like that as a SAAS provider so to say.  But Yes I have thought about and like your idea of doing a "backup" in the desktop app.

[cdotzenrod]

I would suggest you try a small POC type test to validate with a totally different server and SSAS connector.  You could use the Adventureworks Tabular cube for example.  I know from experience that I have done maintenance on my SSAS server and cubes (cube deploys and server maint) and everything continued to work after reboots.  The only gotcha I could think of is if the new SSAS server is a new DNS/IP.  In that case, I think you would have to re-create your reports as I don't see a way to edit a report and point it at a new connection.  The existing connection would have to be pointed at the new server you are standing up as there is no option to edit existing SSAS connections in Power BI.  However, if you take down the old server and bring up the new server with the same DNS/IP address as the old one and the security for SSAS is correct it should work.  Again, I highly suggest you do a dry run test with a test environment as I haven't actually tried the approach I suggested in this post.