There are a lot of tools available these days when it comes to reporting. In this book, we'll use Power BI for several reasons:

• It has a free version. We'll talk about the different versions later in this chapter.
• It can connect to a wide variety of data sources.
• There are many transformations and merges that can be applied to the data sources from it.
• It is easy to use and has a lot of visualizations available.

Power BI is not that new in the reporting world; it has been around for almost 5 years now. It has evolved since then and continues to evolve. Microsoft releases an update to Power BI monthly.

From a modern data warehouse perspective, we need a reporting tool that is flexible enough to accommodate a wide variety of users, from beginners or casual users to power users. As we will see later in this chapter, Power BI can address all of these mentioned users and can also connect to many data sources, be it on the cloud or on-premise.

The next sections will first explain what type of BI (short for Business Intelligence) a modern data warehouse solution should support. Later in this chapter, we'll use Power BI to create dashboards and reports on Azure Data Lake and Azure Databricks, as well as our on-premise data warehouse.