Different types of BI

In this section, we will discuss various types of BI depending on the use cases.

Self-service – personal

This is the type of BI or reports that users will work upon themselves. In this scenario, they use Power BI for desktop to connect to the data sources they want to, whether they are in the data warehouse or anywhere else on the cloud, such as Twitter feeds, data lakes, Spark, and so on.

Most of these sources require that users import data in the Power BI data model to their local machine. If the data source contains a large amount of data, this can consume a lot of resources. But in this mode, data can be altered, in the sense that the source data can be merged or transformed. No live connection is needed to connect to the data as it is imported to Power BI's underlying model. This model is meant to allow users to explore their data and modify it to suit their needs better. They have almost complete control over it.

If the data source is an SQL Server relational database...