This has surely been brought up before, but it's worth mentioning again, the data modeling in the web application for PowerBI is extremely limited, in some degrees to the point of being unusable, when compared with other data/BI solutions.
For a very simple example, let's connect to a Jira datasource in PowerBI web. Because this connection is driven by a service, it is only available in PowerBI web view; there is no way to connect directly from PowerBI desktop.
Awesome, we've connected to the Jira service in PowerBI Web, and the data fields from our database are now being imported. Next step, I want to determine how long the average work item stays Active and alternatively, how long work items take to Close once they're in a Resolved state. In PowerBI desktop, I can easily do this by adding a custom colummn in the Edit Queries dialog which simply subtracts one column value from another. In PowerBI web... not so clear. In fact, I'm not sure if there's any easy (or even difficult) way to get these raw numbers of how long a work item was in a given state.
This is incredibly limiting for data sources, like the Jira example, which can only be accessed from the PowerBI web view. This limitation should not be overlooked; because of it we have opted to create a batch script to import from Jira to Excel so we can manually transform this data and have subsequently opted to forego PowerBI for the bulk of our data solutions on our current project. This wasn't our Plan A, but the limitations with PowerBI nevertheless necessitate it.
Really looking for a solution to this, without one, it's difficult to justify using PowerBI compared to other tools which can solve same problem with a fraction of the resources.
