I Wrote a Book – Hands-On SQL Server 2019 Analysis Services

While not the first time I have authored, this is the first book that I wrote as the sole author. Analysis Services is the product I built my career in business intelligence on and was happy to take on the project when I was approached by Packt.

I think one of my favorite questions is about how much research time did I put in for this book. The right answer is almost 20 years. I started working with Analysis Services when it was called OLAP Services and that was a long time ago. Until Power Pivot for Excel and tabular model technology was added to the mix, I worked in the multidimensional model. I was one of the few, or so it seems, that enjoyed working in the multidimensional database world including working with MDX (multidimensional expressions). However, I was very aware that tabular models with the Vertipaq engine were the model of the future. Analysis Services has continued to be a significant part of the BI landscape and this book give you the opportunity to try it out for yourself.

This book is designed for those who are most recently involved in business intelligence work but have been working more in the self-service or end user tools. Now you are ready to take your model to the next level and that is where Analysis Services comes into play. As part of Packt’s Hands On series, I focused on getting going with Analysis Services from install to reporting. Microsoft has developer editions of the software which allow you to do a complete walk through of everything in the book in a step by step fashion. You will start the process by getting the tools installed, downloading sample data, and building out a multidimensional model. Once you have that model built out, then we do build a similar model using tabular model technology. We follow that up by building reports and visualizations in both Excel and Power BI. No journey is complete without working through security and administration basics. If you want learn by doing, this is the book for you.

If you are interested in getting the book, you can order it from Amazon or Packt. From November 20, 2020 through December 20, 2020, you can get a 25% discount using the this code – 25STEVEN or by using this link directly.

I want to thank the technical editors that worked with me to make sure the content and the steps worked as expected – Alan Faulkner, Dan English, and Manikandan Kurup. Their attention to detail raised the quality of the book significantly and was greatly appreciated.

I have to also thank Tazeen Shaikh who was a great content editor to work with. When she joined the project, my confidence in the quality of the final product increased as well. She helped me sort out some of the formatting nuances and coordinated the needed changes to the book. Her work on the book with me was greatly appreciated. Finally, many thanks to Kirti Pisat who kept me on track in spite of COVID impacts throughout the writing of the book this year.

I hope you enjoy the book!

SQL Saturday – Dallas – May 2018

I was able to present at SQL Saturday Dallas this year. Thanks to those of you who were able to attend. As I noted in the meeting you can find details related to Power BI Data Security in the following posts on my site.

Power BI Is Finally in the Azure Trust Center

Power BI Data Security – Sharing in Email

Power BI Data Security – Sharing

Power BI and Data Security – App Workspaces and Power BI Apps

Power BI and Data Security – Free User’s Cannot Share, Read Only in Premium

Power BI and Data Security – Row Level Security (RLS)

Power BI and Data Security – Data Classification and Privacy Levels

Power BI and Data Security – On-premises Data Gateway

Power BI and Data Security – Sharing Data

Power BI and Data Security – Compliance and Encryption

I have also added the presentation here if you want to review it as well.

Thanks again for joining me in Dallas.

Power BI Data Security – Sharing in Email

 

Microsoft has expanded sharing by allowing users to share Power BI content via email. In a previous post, I discussed how sharing content within your organization should be handled carefully. However, the new process opens up the opportunity to share outside your organization by sending an email. In particular, you can now share with users who have a personal email address such as @outlook.com and @gmail.com. Let’s dig into the implications of this capability.

Sharing Using Email

First, you need to be aware that this functionality is as simple as the original methods of sharing. You click the Share button on your report or dashboard to open the Share dialog.

The Share report dialog in this case accepts email addresses which is not a significant change. However, as shown below, you can add personal emails and emails outside your organization. You be warned, but users do not always pay attention to this or understand the implications.

You will also notice that consumers need to still have a Power BI Pro account assigned to them or you need to be using Power BI Premium for this to work.

Following the Email Process

When you share, you usually will need to send an email to the recipient. Here is the email content.

Time to click the report link. This opens a series of dialogs which determine how much you have access. It is important to note that this is all made possible with Azure B2B. More about that in a moment. Let’s trace the story through. The link opens the following page.

As you can see, the next step is to log in. I am using an outlook.com account so it prompts me to authenticate. Once I have authenticated, I get the following notice.

My account does not have Power BI Pro, but now I can try it for free for 60 days and get access to the data while I am on the trial. I clicked both options, because I can. The Upgrade account option would require me to pay for Pro. However, Try Pro for free works and I was able to access the report fully. I have successfully shared my corporate content with a personal user.

Preventing Sharing Outside Your Organization

While in some cases, you need to share outside your organization, we will assume here you need to disable this functionality. There are a few places you can make this happen.

Power BI Admin Portal

First, in Power BI go to the Admin portal and disable sharing outside your organization. If you have followed my previous advice, this will already be disabled.

 

As you can see, this will disable content for users who have been shared with previously. If you need to share, you can specify groups that have that permission.

Office 365 Admin Center

Next, this can be turned off in the Office 365 Admin Center in the Security and privacy area.

This prevents the ability to add guest users to the organization. This will disable this capability across Office 365. There is no option to allow some users this access. Once this is disabled, sharing outside the organization which requires a guest user will not be possible.

Azure Active Directory

Finally, you can shut this down from Azure Active Directory. Guest users are ultimately managed through Azure Active Directory and this is the best place to turn this off corporately if you do not need this functionality.

In AAD you have four options.

1. Guest users permissions are limited. This limits guest user capabilities with regard to the directory. Yes is the default and recommended.
2. Admins and users in the guest inviter role can invite. This would be a typical option we can understand. However, it is important to note that Admin users in Power BI workspaces will have the ability to create guest users and share reports externally with this permission on.
3. Members can invite. Just like it sounds. Any member of a group can invite guest users in.
4. Guests can invite. This allows guests to invite other guests. Seems dangerous to me.

As you can see from my tenant, the options are all on which is the default. Be sure to understand what capability you want to use and set it appropriately within your tenant.

Tracking Sharing

In the Office 365 logging, you can see who and what has been shared. This log covers internal and external shares and should be monitored for auditing and compliance purposes.

Azure B2B

Azure B2B and the sharing capabilities in Power BI go hand in hand. This allows organizations to share content in a controlled fashion to consumers outside their organization. While this is required for certain scenarios, be mindful of who has the capability to share, and track sharing to make sure the data is being handled as you require.

Final Thoughts and References

You need to remember that sharing is at the heart of Power BI and you need to manage how and who can share. If you need to do more extensive sharing, by all means, use these features. For those, who need to lock it down tighter, you can follow the steps above to prevent sharing until you have a process and pattern. Power BI continues to improve and grow and as that happens we can expect more security options to support the new functionality. Enjoy Power BI, it is a great tool and will only continue to get better.

References

Using Azure AD B2B with Power BI

Auditing Power BI

Share your Power BI content with anyone by email

 

 

Power BI Data Security – Sharing

Microsoft recently added more sharing capabilities that may change my view on sharing within the enterprise. As with all things Power BI, change is inevitable.

Up to this point, I recommended that customers did not use sharing as an enterprise solution due to the inability to manage it and the potential to share data within the organization that violates compliance or internal rules.

Sharing Within Your Organization

When you share a dashboard or a report within your organization, you share the data with it. Here is the issue from my perspective. If you allow users to share content, they are responsible to share responsibly. That is correct. The content creators are now responsible to manage security as well. So, let’s walk through the basics of using sharing effectively and securely within your organization.

Why Share?

The primary reason to use share is to distribute content outside the context of a Power BI App. Power BI Apps should be your first mechanism for sharing content within your organization. It requires more thought and planning which is typically a good idea with your companies data. However, there are times when sharing makes sense. With the ability to share reports, you can limit sharing to specific areas. Also, you may want to create a “one-off” report for use in decision making but not something to be deployed in the long term.

Sharing is very different from deploying Apps. App deployment is not that difficult to do, but prevents sharing and is much easier to manage access.

The Process of Sharing

Sharing capabilities are readily available on any content that you create.

At this point, there is no way to prevent sharing within your organization. Content can be shared from My Workspace as well.

The first step to sharing is to click the Share button on the report or dashboard you want to share.

This will launch a dialog for sharing the report or dashboard as shown here:

I have highlighted a couple of key parts to the dialog. The first is that you can share with individuals, distribution lists, and security groups. This is similar to the permissions you can apply to an App during deployment. As a content creator, I can distribute in this fashion. Typically power users who create content will use individual names or distribution lists as they are the most common methods of working with teams.

The next part to understand is the Allow recipients to share your report option. I have a couple of issues with this option. First, it is on by default. This means if someone shares with a peer in their department that individual can then share outside their department. The original content creator no longer has control of who this is shared to when this option is turned on which is my second issue. While the content creator will be able to see everyone they share with in the Access panel of the dialog when they review it later, they have potentially released data “into the wild” without controls if they do not set this up properly.

Click Share. You have successfully shared your report. Next, let’s have a look at the Access panel after the share is done. This panel is used view and manage sharing within the workspace.

When in this dialog you can see who has what level of access to the report or dashboard you are currently in. You will see all reshares here as well. This will allow the content creator to remove access if needed.

The Manage permissions link opens up a dialog that lets you view and manage permissions for the entire workspace.

As you can see, sharing is managed by content creators. It will be important for them to understand the process.

Monitoring Sharing

Your Power BI environment should have auditing turned on. This will allow you to run reports to understand who has shared reports and dashboards across the tenant. This will be required to manage auditing and compliance within your organization.

Sharing and Security Thoughts

As I worked through this capability, there are a couple of closing thoughts on security to keep in mind.

1. You cannot prevent sharing. You must monitor it, so be sure you have auditing turned on in your subscription.
2. This has a place when sharing on a smaller scale. I would not recommend it as the standard process, but it allows you to share content in smaller chunks.
3. You must have a process and policy for sharing. This has to be understood by content creators.
4. If you implement row-level security in Power BI or SSAS, it is honored in sharing. This will prevent unauthorized access to sensitive data. Use this when you have particularly sensitive data in use.

One other thought. If this is a significant concern, you should evaluate Power BI Premium as it will allow to manage which users have the capability to create and share content. Free users are effectively read only within the organization. This will be cost-prohibitive for smaller organizations unless security is the primary concern.

Properly planned for you will be able to share effectively with Apps as a deployment model.

Power BI and Data Security – Free User’s Cannot Share, Read Only in Premium

As part of the Power BI Premium release, Microsoft changed how the “free users” in Power BI work within the platform. There are two key changes that affect the data security within your organization.

Power BI Free Users Cannot Share

One of the key areas of concern around the free user accounts was the fact that a corporate user can deploy content to the Power BI service (online). This would allow users to unintentionally (or intentionally) share data with others who would normally not have access to that data. When Microsoft released Power BI Premium, this capability was removed. While Power BI Free Users have access to all of the core capabilities of the product, they are not permitted to share or participate in the collaboration in workspaces. Essentially they only have access to My Workspace.

If they try to create an App Workspace, they get prompted to upgrade.

Free Users Are Read Only in Power BI Premium

When a customer chooses to use Power BI Premium, they can take advantage of “unlimited”, free, read only users. I called out the fact that Power BI did not support free users in a previous post about sharing content. Now with Power BI Apps and Premium, free users are turned into Read Only users. This is a huge win for the Power BI user community. This currently only works with Premium, so if security and managing content creation are key to success within your organization, you should be reviewing Power BI Premium.

I will have a follow up post on how Power BI Apps and App Workspaces impact data security in Power BI soon. If you want to have a look at creating and using Apps and App Workspaces check out this post on the Power BI site.