FREMONT, CA: With an aim of adding new capabilities for data analytics, Microsoft Power BI Gateway now supports SAP HANA platform and SQL Analysis services, reports Pedro Hernandez for eWEEK.

Microsoft Power BI Personal Gateway is a Business Intelligence tool that helps collect and organize business data. It provides quick transfer between Power BI service and on premise data sources enabling IT administrators to assert control over their user’s data exploration and visualization activities. The gateways provide end user connectivity to on premises data sources allowing cloud powered business intelligence and data visualization platform to generate charts, graphs and reports.

Power BI Gateway Enterprise administrators can include SAP HANA as a DirectQuery data source that uses data stored in SQL Server database. Providing access to updated data, DirectQuery mode eliminates the need to maintain a number of copies of data for analytics. Once the SAP HANA data source is set up, enterprises can create and edit Power BI reports using the latest information provided by SAP HANA.

 SQL Server Analysis delivers online analytical processing for business intelligence applications allowing users to design, create and manage multidimensional structures that include data collected from various data sources. The inclusion of SQL Server Analytics allows enterprises to access database’s operations, objects and data. However, administrators can determine the level of access granted to various users and ensure that employees can view only the data authorized to them.

"With the updated gateway you can now connect to Analysis Services and issue live queries to both tabular as well as multidimensional models, For multidimensional models, we use the DAX (Data Analysis Expressions) over MD capability to connect to on-premises multidimensional models and a pre-requisite of SQL Server Analysis Services Enterprise edition," says Power BI team, Microsoft.