Add new capabilities to Premium Gen2

Important

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Enabled for Public preview General availability
Admins, makers, marketers, or analysts, automatically Jan 24, 2021 Sep 30, 2021

Business value

Premium Gen2 offers an enhanced platform with better performance, scalability, and flexible licensing with pay as you go (PAYG) autoscale.

Feature details

The Premium Gen2 enhanced platform offers additional benefits. These include:

  • Flexible licensing: Power BI Premium licenses can now be assigned per user.

  • Better performance: We’re improving performance on any capacity size, any time. For example, analytics operations will run up to 16X faster. Also, operations will always perform at top speed and will not slow down when the load on the capacity approaches the capacity limits.

  • Greater scale:

    • There are no limits on refresh concurrency, so you don’t have to track refresh schedule spacing.
    • There are fewer memory restrictions. The memory size of your capacity now relates to the maximum supported size for a single dataset. You can have many datasets active on your capacity at the same time and not experience forced evictions or delays due to memory overuse.
    • There's complete separation between report interaction and scheduled operations (such as refreshes). Premium Gen2 treats capacities as logical containers of computing power for analytics. It allocates compute resources for scheduled operations, like refreshes, differently than it does for report interactions. As a result, there is no impact on report interaction over datasets that are being refreshed since refreshes will always accrue their utilization cost on your capacity after they complete.
  • Upgraded metrics: We’re making the metrics easier to use with clear and normalized capacity utilization data that's only dependent on the analytics operations the capacity performs and not on its size or level of load. Things like utilization analysis, budget planning, chargebacks, and the need to upgrade will be tracked and clearly reported as a single metric. Your main utilization report will track "CPU utilization" and you can see how you consume CPU against the quota of your logical capacity, what artifacts drive that consumption over time, and so on.

  • Autoscale: You'll have the ability to automatically add one v-core at a time for a 24-hour period when the CPU load on the capacity exceeds its limits. This will prevent slowdowns caused by unplanned overuse. V-cores will be automatically removed when 24 hours have passed. The additional v-cores will be charged to an Azure subscription of your choice on a pay-as-you-go basis.

These features will significantly reduce management overhead with proactive and configurable admin notifications about capacity utilization level, load increase, and autoscaling limits.

See also

Understanding Power BI Premium Gen2 (docs)