Question about "graduating" from PBI desktop to Visual Studio for tabular modeling

[dbeavon3]

I have a pbix dataset that I've been developing in the PBI desktop.  It has reached a point where I spend a lot of time using external tools (tabular editor) to manage measures, calculation groups, etc.

I'm considering a transition to the Visual Studio IDE (tabular modeling via the Analysis Services extension for VS).  It is probably important to say that I already have several other models (bim) that are managed in VS, so it won't be an unusual/isolated dataset.  These are deployed to Power BI Premium (xmla endpoints)

For the particular dataset I'm dealing with now, the tipping point is the need to start managing custom partitions.  Unfortunately the PBI desktop seems to be unable to handle this very well (even with some additional help from the tabular editor).

Question - is it common for datasets to "graduate" from the PBI desktop, and make the transition into Visual Studio?   For the datasets that cannot be managed in PBI desktop, is it more common for the community to migrate them into VS or into tabular editor? (3?)

Thoughts?

PS. I suspect there are lots of answers to this.  The Power BI tooling ecosystem is a very confusing and a bit cluttered.  I generally start my datasets by building them in PBI desktop.  Based on my own experience, PBI desktop will eventually become an insufficient tool for around ~10% or 20% of my datasets.  There is always a good deal of pain that comes before determining when to pull the trigger and make the transition to VS.  Of course VS has some of its own problems, but it seems to be focused on enterprise-grade development, and it has accomodation for source control (... which is a welcome concept that became increasingly popular sometime in the past fifty years or so). 

[dbeavon3]

Thanks @GilbertQ .

>> you can move it to Visual Studio if you are going to use AAS

Now that Power BI premium has xmla endpoints, Microsoft is claiming that it can serve as a substitute (superset) of AAS.  IE. You can simply deploy bim's from VS to your PBI premium capacity.

The reason for my question is because I've heard some folks claim that they migrate their models to "tabular editor".  They say that this migration may take place after the PBI desktop is no longer capable of managing their datasets.  However it seems to me that migrating a model to a Visual Studio bim is probably the better choice, since it relies on Microsoft tools and the transition (from PBI Desktop to Visual Studio) won't involve the potential loss of Microsoft tech support.

While I hear lots of good things from bloggers about "tabular editor" (and I frequently use it myself), I have reluctance in doing a permanent migration to tools which are maintained by the community.  Perhaps if Microsoft would open-source their mashup engine and tabular engine then I would agree that the community projects have legs.  Otherwise it seems like a poor decision to make a permanent switch to those community (or third-party) tools.

[GilbertQ]

Hi @dbeavon3 

I have not seen anywhere where it says you can deploy the model.bim to to PBI Premium capacity if you have something to this please share the link!

With regards to the 3rd party tools, I would say that these tools have invested a lot of time and effort and that they are not going anywhere and would say that they are getting better and better over time. I certainly am using them on a daily basis and it works well for me.

Unfortunately the Mashup Engine and Tabular Engine is Microsoft's property and I really doubt that it would ever be open sourced!

[dbeavon3]

@GilbertQ 

Check out these two links.  

https://www.sqlbi.com/articles/development-tools-for-tabular-models-in-2021/

https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/community-tools-for-enterprise-powerbi-and-analysisservices...

... basically what you will find is that the "xmla" endpoints (for power BI premium) allow both SSMS and visual studio to interact with the premium capacity in a way that is similar to an AAS resource in Azure.

Here is a section of interest:

Migrating from Analysis Services to Power BI Premium
A Tabular model created in Visual Studio cannot be edited in Power BI Desktop. It is possible to deploy a model from Visual Studio to Power BI Premium. The backup of an Analysis Services model can be restored in Power BI Premium starting in April 2021 (the feature is not available at the time of writing).

Notice that even a binary backup can be moved .

... There are some caveats... not all features are cross-compatible so I normally have to tweak the bim/tmsl a little in order for the migration to proceed smoothly.

FYI, David

[GilbertQ]

Thanks for those details.

That does talk about going from AAS to Power BI and not the other way around....

I would agree that once you have it in AAS then you can use all the AAS tooling etc!

[dbeavon3]

@GilbertQ 
Another formal link about developing PBI premium models in visual studio:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/enterprise/service-premium-connect-tools#deploy-model-proj...

... it seems to me that this is still not a common practice among the citizen developers on on this community.  However the benefit of using a VS bim is that it is better suited to source control than a pbix.

[GilbertQ]

Hi @dbeavon3 

There is quite a lot to this question, yes you can move it to Visual Studio if you are going to use AAS. I have actually gone the other way and moves from AAS to Power BI and while you have to use a few tools it can certainly do the job and sometimes it is easier than Visual Studio.

The only thing which is a challenge is Source Control, which I am sure they will fix at some point.

If you want to move it across you would need to copy and paste all the Power Query tables to Visual Studio. You can then use Tabular Editor to copy and paste all the measures and relationships between Power BI and the Model.bim

The rest you would need to do by hand!