Power BI Premium Deployment Pipelines and Sub Workspaces – Publishing a live report to a pro workspace from a premium workspace

I wanted to have a look at a specific set up we have in regards to our Power BI Workspaces and apps

1. We have Power BI Premium P1 Node
2. We use dataflows
3. We use a Deployment Pipeline for Dev Test and Production Premium Workspaces
4. We have a scenario where we have a sub workspace with a smaller number of reports than the main reports

Deployment Pipelines

Lets have a look at the master Workspace that contains all our dataflows, datasets and reports live connected to the dataset

And for all three areas there is also an app to test usability for Viewers (and for the viewers of all the reports in Prod

Current issues with Deployment Pipelines and dataflows

The great thing about pipelines is that we don’t have to keep copies of Test and Prod reports. There are just Dev Pbix files. However, for Production. How do you know that your Production reports are using the dataflows connected to the Production SQL database?

The issue at the moment is that there is a bug that leaves the development data source in with the Production data source for the data flow. You can see this if you go into Lineage View

In the Prod Pipeline we have set the reports to use Prod dataflow and updated the user and password but from here how do you know that this has worked?

The best way I have found to do this is to export the dataflow Json … Export to Json

And look at the file in Notepad and check the source Source = Sql.Database(\”prd-

Its showing as production so I can be happy that the production reports are against the production database

The Sub Workspace

So we have a model for a production app to sit on where users can view all the reports.

However we have another cohort who can only see the reports B and not report A or C.

We can only have one app per workspace so we cant create another app with just one report.

The answer here is to create a sub workspace and republish the Production report across to this new workspace.

The question here is….. Can the sub workspace be a none premium workspace if we are live connected to a dataset in a Premium workspace?

Lets find out by first assessing the situation we want to set up

Process to move the production reports in the deployment pipeline to another workspace

We want to publish the production report to a new workspace (With just the one report in it)

And as a further complication, We want to live connect to a dataset in a Premium workspace and recreate a report in a Pro Workspace.

Not only that, but the Pbix file is set to dev not Prod and there is no production pbix file.

First of all in your Production Workspace go to your report (content) Click … and Save a copy

And Here is the Lineage in Power BI

So how do we check that this report is connected to Dev data flow not prod dataflow

At this point I would probably recommend having something in SQL to connect to like a view or a table containing the datasource name to test with. This would be really handy.

We have to assume that this is the case because it comes from Production workspace which is definitely connected to Prod its good. Also, You could check the data between dev and Prod at this point too.

To test, an app was published and the data was exactly the same as the report in the master workspace.

The good thing about this set up, you only have one copy of the data in master. You don’t have to have the same data duplicated in another workspace, taking up more space in the Power BI Premium Node.

And because its such a small workspace, we don’t have to create it in Premium so we don’t need our Power BI Admin to set it up as a Premium workspace

Licensing

Now you have to think about Licensing. Everyone who needs access to the report in the Pro workspace now needs a Pro account themselves. Great if you have a P3 License which gives everyone free Pro accounts.

But what if you don’t have everyone on Power BI Pro licenses. Or you have external users and you haven’t given them a Pro license?

Lots to think about here with this Mix of Premium and Pro. this might then be a case of going to your Power BI Admin and asking them to switch the Workspace to Premium simply due to the Licenses against the report viewers.