Power BI Solutions & Integrations

Yes, reporting is Power BI’s primary purpose. Users can design paginated reports for data analysis. You can customize layouts, charts, color palettes, data sources, and more to tailor reports for finance, compliance, or board-level reporting. However, reporting features like automation, deeper customization options, and large dataset performance are areas that Power BI struggles to keep up without add-ons like Power ON.

Dashboards are single-page, high-level overviews that pin key visuals (or tiles) and KPIs for easy access. On the other hand, reports are multi-page canvases that display a variety of charts, tables, and other elements that enable deeper exploration via tools like filters and drill-down. Because of these distinctions, dashboards are typically used for summarizing insights (e.g. executive summaries), while reports are more useful for detailed analysis with parameters, custom visuals, and more.

One of the biggest limitations of Power BI is its static visualizations. Although you can drill down into the underlying report, dashboard tiles themselves don’t support built-in filtering, cross-highlighting, or other modifiable features. Thankfully, Power ON is a powerful add-on that enables you and your team to write back data directly from Power BI for real-time edits and updates. Power BI also tends to struggle with larger datasets, so enterprises (and even businesses using multiple smaller datasets) might experience performance issues and slow load times. However, Jet Analytics is built to efficiently warehouse your data so models remain lean and responsive, while Simba connectors push heavy processing upstream for a better Power BI experience.

Power BI natively connects to over 100 data sources, such as Azure SQL, Salesforce, Google Analytics, and more. It can also connect to on-premise databases and traditional files (Excel, CSV, JSON, etc.). For enterprise-grade connectivity, Simba drivers offer highly optimized, certified connectors for platforms such as MongoDB, Hive, Netezza, Teradata, Snowflake, Redshift, Trino, Impala, and more. Even better, Jet Analytics consolidates data from major ERPs like Dynamics, SAP, and Oracle into a single, BI-friendly schema so users can seamlessly tap into rich data in Power BI without building custom models.

Out-of-the-box, Power BI is primarily read-only. In other words, users can’t edit reports or dashboards from the published version to modify the underlying data or visuals, which makes it difficult to use for real-time planning and forecasting. Integrating Power ON with Power BI adds interactive input forms directly within your reports and dashboards. You can also use it to automate budgeting cycles with built-in workflow management and approvals. Lastly, Power ON comes with a variety of different models that use real-time data to run more accurate forecasts and what-if modeling. If you’re looking to turn Power BI from a passive reporting tool into a dynamic planning platform, look no further than Power ON.

Power BI technically supports several methods to integrate real-time data out-of-the-box (streaming datasets, push APIs, and Azure Event Hubs). However, these often don’t result in the most reliable, low-latency feeds from enterprise systems. Simba’s specialized drivers can maintain persistent, high-throughput connections to databases, pushing incremental updates to Power BI with minimal lag. Jet Analytics once again supports this by automating and scheduling ETL pipelines so your data warehouse (and therefore, Power BI models) reflect the latest information.

We recommend using Jet Analytics, Simba connectors, and Power ON to enhance your Power BI experience. Jet Analytics automates ETL, data warehousing, and semantic modeling for a secure and unified source of truth. Simba provides high-performance access to complex and big-data platforms, eliminating query bottlenecks. Lastly, Power ON enables write-back as well as more comprehensive planning, budgeting, and workflow management capabilities — all from within Power BI.