Power BI Report Server

As an addition to a cloud service PowerBI.com, Microsoft has released a server-based version of Power BI, called Power BI Report Server, which you can run locally on your system. From a licensing standpoint, this is not included with your regular SQL Server license, but actually it's a benefit from running either of the following:

• A SQL Server Enterprise with Software Assurance
• The PowerBI.com service with the Premium subscription type

However, when you download and install Power BI Report Server, you need to be careful about the configuration and available tools. Configuration is handled with a similar Configuration Manager to Reporting Services; you just need to connect to a proper instance running on your server:

The development tool for Power BI Report Server is Power BI Desktop. With Power BI Desktop, there are two different flavors of the desktop client. One version of the client is used with the online service and the other version is used only for the local Report Server installation.

Power BI Report Server, such as Reporting Services, runs as a web application at your server. You can access Report Server with any browser of your choice at the URL, which is configured in the Configuration Manager. When you access the site, you'll see a blank site with no report by default:

To create a report in Power BI Report Server, you can use a Power BI Desktop tool, which is available for download from the www.PowerBI.com website. If you navigate in the web interface of Report Server, there is a download link, which will take you to the Download page:

Power BI Desktop is an application available for free download, which you can use to access your data, transform the data with Power Query (using M language in the background), and create reports with various visualizations:

You can access a really wide range of data sources that can be linked together via their relationship. These relations are detected automatically based on the type of the data source, or you can configure these manually. There's a relationship designer available as the part of the application. On the left navigation bar, you can switch between the report design and relationship manager: