Everything you must know before getting started with deployment pipelines

Power BI combines multiple data sources into logical, visually rich, collaborative insights with the help of a suite of apps, connectors, and technical services. An Excel spreadsheet or a combination of cloud-based and on-premises hybrid data warehouses can be used to store the information and materials. With Power BI , you can quickly combine data sources, assess, and explore what’s important, and share your findings with others.

In this article, we’ll go over the Deployment Pipeline in Power BI and provide some useful information on Microsoft Power BI Consulting and development services.

A deployment pipeline is a tool used to handle the challenges of collaboration and efficiency. It enables BI scientists to design and control each stage of the workflow. These modules can be reprocessed to save time and improve productivity. It enables developers to generate and test content before making it available to real-world users in a production setting. These contents could include summaries, reports, the dataset itself, and a variety of other things.

The Deployment Pipelines tool is a Power BI Service feature that allows developers to manage the development lifecycle of content within their domain. The tool is intended to be a reusable and efficient pipeline that automates content flow via three stages:

In a development workspace, you can create, review, and update the material. Deploy the content to the test stage when it’s ready to be tested and reviewed.

In this preproduction workspace, test and validate that the material is correct. Deploy the content to the production stage when it’s ready to be disseminated to your users.

The workspace content has been thoroughly vetted and is available for your users to consume via an app or access to the production workspace.

• Create a deployment pipeline first
• Designate a work area
• Deploy to a new empty stage
• Create deployment rules in step four.

The deployment pipeline allowed development teams to focus more on innovating and improving the end product for the user. By reducing the need for any manual tasks, teams can deploy new code updates much quicker and with less risk of any human error.

Some considerations or prerequisites, which must be followed before getting started with Deployment pipelines

The Deployment Pipelines are created at the workspace level. The workspace must be a Premium workspace (created with a Premium account), and you must be the admin of that workspace. Workspaces are collaborative workspaces where you can develop collections of dashboards, reports, datasets, and paginated reports with your colleagues.

Note: Currently it is not possible to create deployment pipelines for workspaces created with a non-premium account. The premium workspaces will show up with a diamond

A pipeline can be created using the deployment pipelines tab or a workspace. After you’ve constructed the pipeline, you may either share it with other people or delete it. When you share a pipeline with others, the users with whom you share the pipeline gain access to it. Users with pipeline access can view, share, modify, and delete the pipeline. Make a pipeline by giving it a name and a description in the Create a deployment pipeline dialog box.

Select Deployment pipelines from the navigation pane in the Power BI service, then create a pipeline. In the Create a deployment pipeline dialog box, enter a name and description for the pipeline and select Create. You can also create a pipeline from an existing workspace, providing you’re the admin of a new workspace experience.

Here is a Microsoft blog about creating the deployment pipelines

• If you’re using the test stage to simulate real-life data usage, it’s recommended to separate the development and test data sources. The development database should be relatively small, and the test database should be as similar as possible to the production database. Use data source rules to switch data sources in the test stage.
• Controlling the amount of data, you import from your data source is useful if you’re using a production data source in the test stage. To do this, add a parameter to your data source query in Power BI Desktop. Use parameter rules to control the amount of imported data or edit the parameter’s value. You can also use this approach if you don’t want to overload your capacity.

• The workplace should have a high capacity.
• In a single deployment, the maximum number of Power BI elements that may be deployed is 300.
• It is not possible to download a PBIX file after it has been deployed: After deployment, downloading a dataset (from the stage it’s been deployed to) is not supported, you cannot download a dataset from a location in the pipeline other than its original uploaded workspace
• If another item in the target stage is identical (for example, if both files are reports) and has the same name as a Power BI item being deployed for the first time, the deployment will fail.

• Datasets that use real-time data connectivity can’t be deployed.
• A dataset with Direct Query or Composite connectivity mode, that uses variation or calendar tables, isn’t supported. · During deployment, if the target dataset is using a live connection, the source dataset must use this connection mode too.
• After deployment, downloading a dataset (from the stage it’s been deployed to) isn’t supported.

• Azure Analysis Services
• Azure Synapse
• SSAS
• Azure SQL Server
• SQL Server
• OData feed
• Oracle
• SAP Hana (only the import mode)
• SharePoint
• Teradata

A wide range of businesses rely on our Power BI consultants for business intelligence and data visualization. Our Power BI Consulting Service includes a complete consultation to identify gaps and opportunities by employing Power BI to provide strong insights via dashboards and data visualization. Power BI is a Microsoft application that uses business intelligence to give enterprises a 360-degree perspective of their operations

We aim to give you those insights so you can make informed decisions based on all aspects of the company. Contact us today to learn more about Power BI deployment pipelines—or enhanced analytics.