Microsoft’s new Power BI service to be generally available starting July 24

The purpose of the data catalog, which is a cloud service managed by Microsoft, is to provide a way to identify the sources, and then search for them in an organized fashion.

In a blog post published this morning, Microsoft’s Joseph Sirosh, corporate vice president at Microsoft, who is in charge of Azure ML, announced the public preview of the Azure Data Catalog, an in-house tool to facilitate discovery of a company’s data sources. This chart provides detailed differences between the two tiers; focusing on data refresh rates and cooperation aptitudes.

Users who subscribe to specific services can connect to their accounts through Power BI to access prebuilt reports and dashboards.

Speaking of Apache Spark, as of today, July 10, Microsoft is making a public preview of Spark on its HDInsight Hadoop-on-Azure service publicly available. With Power BI users can monitor streaming data sources via live, continuously updating visuals. Microsoft has released content packs for 16 services, including Salesforce, Marketo, etc. “And we have a backlog that could keep us on that pace for a year”. Also available on July 24 will be Power BI Desktop – formerly known as Power BI Designer. The app also received new features to enhance its data modeling capabilities including Calculated Columns and Data Categorization.

In related news, Microsoft also announced that the Power BI visualization framework and its complete library of visuals are available to the open source community under an MIT license.

Azure is an open and flexible cloud computing infrastructure, which develops, deploys, and manages services and applications via a worldwide data-center network, either owned by the company, or hosted by its partners. “This supersedes the Power BI for Office 365 service (Power BI 1.0), which we will continue to operate during a transition period as users migrate to the updated service”.

Power BI has proven quite popular among its early adopters, Phillips said.

Over half a million unique users, across more than 45,000 companies spanning 185 countries have signed up for Power BI in the six months it’s been in preview, the company added. Microsoft’s move could put pressure on existing players, including IBM, Oracle, Qlik, Salesforce, Seattle-based Tableau Software, and other companies in the business intelligence and data visualization market.

Once the service reaches general availability, Phillips said that he expects the Power BI team will increase its pace of launching new features.

Gone are the days of ‘here are the ten types of charts you can use to visualize your data, If you want something really custom that no one else would find relevant, you can now do that with Power BI. A Power BI Pro subscription costs US$9.99 per user per month, and ups the service’s data capacity to 10GB per user and adds support for hourly refresh along with a bunch of other benefits.