This article describes Power BI Premium operations and considerations, to view a high level description of how Microsoft Fabric works, see Microsoft Fabric concepts and licenses.
Power BI Premium provides enhancements to Power BI, and a comprehensive portfolio of Premium features. The following table lists some of the Premium enhancements.
Enhancement
Details
Purchase Premium for individuals in your organization
Capacity performance depends only on the amount of CPU usage. Metrics can be easily understood using the Microsoft Fabric Capacity Metrics app.
Autoscale
An optional feature that prevents slowdowns caused by throttling on overloaded capacities. When enabled, if the load on the capacity exceeds the capacity limits, autoscale automatically adds one v-core at a time for 24-hour periods. Additional v-cores are charged to your Azure subscription on a pay-as-you-go basis.
Capacities and SKUs
Capacity is a dedicated set of resources reserved for exclusive use. It offers dependable, consistent performance for your content.
Each capacity offers a selection of SKUs, and each SKU provides different resource tiers for computing power. The type of SKU you require, depends on the type of solution you wish to deploy.
SKU
Capacity Units (CU)
Power BI SKU
Power BI v-cores
F2
2
N/A
N/A
F4
4
N/A
N/A
F8
8
EM1/A1
1
F16
16
EM2/A2
2
F32
32
EM3/A3
4
F64
64
P1/A4
8
F128
128
P2/A5
16
F256
256
P3/A6
32
F5121
512
P4/A7
64
F10241
1,024
P5/A8
128
F20481
2,048
N/A
N/A
1 These SKUs aren't available in all regions. To request using these SKUs in regions where they're not available, contact your Microsoft account manager.
Subscriptions and licensing
Power BI Premium is a tenant-level Microsoft 365 subscription, available in two SKU (Stock-Keeping Unit) families.
EM1 and EM2 SKUs are available only through volume licensing plans. You can't purchase them directly.
Workspaces
Workspaces reside within capacities. Each Power BI user has a personal workspace known as My Workspace. Additional workspaces known as workspaces can be created to enable collaboration. By default, workspaces, including personal workspaces, are created in the shared capacity. When you have Premium capacities, both My Workspaces and workspaces can be assigned to Premium capacities.
Capacity administrators automatically have their My workspaces assigned to Premium capacities.
Semantic model SKU limitation
With Power BI Premium and Power BI Embedded, there are memory limits and other constraints for each SKU listed in the table below.
SKU
Max memory (GB)1, 2
Max concurrent DirectQuery connections (per semantic model)1
2 The Max memory (GB) column represents an upper bound for the semantic model size. However, an amount of memory must be reserved for operations such as refreshes and queries on the semantic model. The maximum semantic model size permitted on a capacity might be smaller than the numbers in this column.
3DirectQuery parallelism can improve your query response times. The lower number indicates the default maximum number of queries that can be processed at the same time. The higher number indicates the maximum number of queries that can be processed at the same time. To change the default use the Model.MaxParallelismPerQuery property.
4 These limits apply to Direct Lake tables and models, and are guardrails that affect fallback to DirectQuery. Direct Lake semantic models have additional constraints that are based on SKUs, as listed in fallback.
Semantic model memory usage
Semantic model operations such as queries are subject to individual memory limits. To illustrate the restriction, consider a semantic model with an in-memory footprint of 1 GB, and a user initiating an on-demand refresh while interacting with a report based on the same semantic model. Three separate actions determine the amount of memory attributed to the original semantic model, which may be larger than two times the semantic model size. The total amount of memory used by one Power BI item can't exceed the SKU's Max memory per semantic model allocation.
Loading the semantic model - The first action is loading the semantic model into the memory.
Refreshing the semantic model - The second action is refreshing the semantic model after it's loaded into the memory. The refresh operation will cause the memory used by the semantic model to double. The required memory doubles because the original copy of data is still available for active queries, while another copy is being processed by the refresh. Once the refresh transaction commits, the memory footprint will reduce.
Interacting with the report - The third action is caused by the user's interaction with the report. During the semantic model refresh, report interactions will execute DAX queries. Each DAX query consumes a certain amount of temporary memory required to produce the results. Each query may consume a different amount of memory. The memory used to query the semantic model is added to the memory needed to load the semantic model, and refresh it.
Refreshes
Power BI Premium and Power BI Embedded don't require cumulative memory limits, and therefore concurrent semantic model refreshes don't contribute to resource constraints. However, refreshing individual semantic models is governed by existing capacity memory and CPU limits, and the model refresh parallelism limit for the SKU, as described in Capacities and SKUs.
You can schedule and run as many refreshes as required at any given time, and the Power BI service will run those refreshes at the time scheduled as a best effort.
Monitoring
When monitoring Power BI Premium and Power BI Embedded, you only need to take into consideration one aspect: how much CPU your capacity requires to serve the load at any moment. To monitor your capacity, use the Microsoft Fabric Capacity Metrics app app.
When using Power BI Premium and Power BI Embedded, Power BI paginated reports benefit from the architectural and engineering improvements reflected in Power BI Premium.
Memory - There's no memory management for Paginated reports.
SKU availability - Paginated reports running on Power BI Premium can run reports across all available embedded and Premium SKUs, including the EM1-EM3 and A1-A3 SKUs. Billing is calculated per CPU hour, across a 24-hour period.
Enhanced security and code isolation - Code isolation occurs at a per-user level, rather than at a per-capacity level.
Dataflows Gen1 and Gen2
Each SKU can run a set number of Dataflows parallel tasks, as listed in this table.
The following known limitations currently apply to Power BI Premium.
Rendering visuals - There's a 225-second limitation for rendering Power BI visuals. Visuals that take longer to render, will be timed-out and won't display.
Throttling - Throttling can occur in Power BI Premium capacities. Concurrency limits are applied per session. An error message will appear when too many operations are being processed concurrently. To mitigate throttling, you can use autoscale. When autoscale is enabled, if CPU consumption exceeds the additional limits, throttling will still take place. To read more about throttling in Fabric, see The Fabric throttling policy.
Client library version - Client applications and tools that connect to and work with semantic models on Premium capacities through the XMLA endpoint require Analysis Services client libraries. Most client applications and tools install the most recent client libraries with regular updates, so manually installing the client libraries isn't usually necessary. Regardless of the client application or tool version, the following minimum client library versions are required.
Client Library
Version
MSOLAP
15.1.65.22
AMO
19.12.7.0
ADOMD
19.12.7.0
In some cases, manually installing the most recent client libraries may be necessary to reduce potential connection and operation errors. To learn more about verifying existing installed client library versions and manually installing the most recent versions, see Analysis Services client libraries.
Semantic models compatibility - Some semantic models are incompatible with the Power BI service modern infrastructure:
Semantic models created in Power BI service from CSV files.
Designing reports for enterprise scale requires more than just connecting to data. Understanding semantic models and strategies for scalability and lifecycle management are key to a successful enterprise implementation. This learning path helps you prepare for the Fabric Analytics Engineer Certification.
Demonstrate methods and best practices that align with business and technical requirements for modeling, visualizing, and analyzing data with Microsoft Power BI.