Power BI is a collection of software services, apps, and connectors that work together to turn your unrelated sources of data into coherent, visually immersive, and interactive insights. Your data may be an Excel spreadsheet, or a collection of cloud-based and on-premises hybrid data warehouses. Power BI lets you easily connect to your data sources, visualize and discover what's important, and share that with anyone or everyone you want.
Power BI consists of several elements that all work together, starting with these three basics:
A Windows desktop application called Power BI Desktop.
An online SaaS (Software as a Service) service called the Power BI service.
Power BI mobile apps for Windows, iOS, and Android devices.
SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) is a reporting software that allows you to produce formatted reports with tables in the form of data, graph, images, and charts. These reports are hosted on a server that can be executed any time using parameters defined by the users. It is part of Microsoft SQL Server Services suite.
SQL Server Integration Services is a platform for building enterprise-level data integration and data transformations solutions. Use Integration Services to solve complex business problems by copying or downloading files, loading data warehouses, cleansing and mining data, and managing SQL Server objects and data.
Integration Services can extract and transform data from a wide variety of sources such as XML data files, flat files, and relational data sources, and then load the data into one or more destinations.
Integration Services includes a rich set of built-in tasks and transformations, graphical tools for building packages, and the Integration Services Catalog database, where you store, run, and manage packages.
You can use the graphical Integration Services tools to create solutions without writing a single line of code. You can also program the extensive Integration Services object model to create packages programmatically and code custom tasks and other package objects.
SQL Server Analysis services (SSAS) is a multi-dimensional OLAP server as well as an analytics engine that allows you to slice and dice large volumes of data. It is part of Microsoft SQL Server and helps perform analysis using various dimensions. It has 2 variants Multidimensional and Tabular. The SSAS full form is SQL Server Analysis Services.
Analysis Services is an analytical data engine (VertiPaq) used in decision support and business analytics. It provides enterprise-grade semantic data model capabilities for business intelligence (BI), data analysis, and reporting applications such as Power BI, Excel, Reporting Services, and other data visualization tools. Analysis Services is available in different platforms.
SQL Server is a software application designed to manage databases, it stores and retrieves data as requested by other applications. When software developers are writing new business applications that store information in a database they will very often use SQL Server’s functionality to look after the databases rather than reinventing the wheel writing their own code to do the same thing. This makes writing database applications easier and quicker (and therefore cheaper) as well as making them more reliable, scalable and secure.
SQL Server is known as a “Relational Database” Management System. Data is stored in tables in a similar way to rows and columns in a spreadsheet. If you imagine a database containing accounting information you may have a table for each invoice with values, VAT, Totals, invoice number etc. Each invoice relates to a customer but instead of recording the customer’s details (name, address, discounts etc.) with each invoice you just record it once in a separate table called Customers. The Customers table and Invoices table are linked or “related”.
The “Management System” part of SQL Server makes sure the databases are stored efficiently and the data can be searched or retrieved as quickly as possible. It also makes sure multiple people connecting to the same data are managed properly so you don’t get problems if two people change the same information at the same time.
