Microsoft Power BI Datamart

Power BI is Microsoft’s popular interactive business intelligence and data visualization tool. At the company’s annual Build conference in May, Microsoft unveiled Power BI Datamart, a new self-service data analytics offering within the Power BI ecosystem that’s expected to take self-service business analytics to a new level.

Datamarts are databases loaded with data about specific subjects for business analytics tasks. The datamart concept has been around for years—in the late 20th century some proponents championed datamarts as a more practical alternative to large-scale data warehouses.

Power BI Datamart combines Microsoft’s Dataflow, Azure SQL Database and Power BI Dataset with a web user interface that allows nontechnical users to build datamarts without any coding. Users can perform data extract, transform and load (ETL) tasks, and create the datasets and semantic models needed for data analysis—all without assistance from IT.

Power BI Datamart is in public preview and will be offered as part of Power BI Premium.