Dashboards, reports, etc are a pain - but its what the clients want. They don't really care what we're doing in the background, they just want their metrics and analytics reports. Power BI has made that part of my job 100x better.
It looks really pretty. But, am I right in saying that this all works by sending all your critical business data to Microsoft servers to run the analysis and generate the reports? Businesses actually do this?
Why would you send data offsite to generate pretty graphs of it? Is this really not available as a self-hosted service?
There is a Power BI Desktop program that is 100% free as in beer available, which runs a private instance of an in-memory columnstore OLAP engine, Power Pivot (same internals as SSAS). It also includes the reporting layer and Power Query, a lightweight ETL tool.
There is an on-prem version of Power BI that the team has committed to including as a feature of SSRS in SQL Server 2016, but the timeline is still fuzzy.
The point of the Power BI hosted portal is not the pretty visuals, but a low-maintenance collaboration portal that includes natural language Q&A on your data, automatic analysis to identify trends in the data, and tight integration with Office 365.
If you want to go on-prem, there is a third party named Pyramid Analytics which offers a solution that allows Power BI hosting.
Power BI is actually a continuation of a number of products. If you want a somewhat equivalent experience on-prem, you can use Power Pivot in Excel (2010+), with Power View on SharePoint (SSRS 2012+, SharePoint 2010+), which gives you an older Silverlight-based report engine that has similar capabilities.
The real useful piece, though is the semantic layer in Power Pivot, which is identical to SSAS. The power in any BI tool is not the reporting layer (though Power View is a pretty good one for the use cases it targets), but in the power and expressivity of the data model. This is an area where Microsoft shines.
I could go on for hours about this - I work in technical presales (and do at least 50% time in a technical delivery role) for an analytics consulting firm that is a Microsoft partner.
Power BI can connect directly to many database engines. Queries are generated on the fly by the reporting engine in a proprietary language called DAX, and DirectQuery is a technology that translated DAX into SQL queries.
This is a mode of operation that has been supported by Microsoft's SSAS OLAP engine for years.
It works quite well, but you do run into some performance overhead with the transpiling step.
Feel free to reach out if you have more detailed questions. I work for an analytics consultancy and we're a Microsoft partner. I live in the Microsoft data platform (SQL Server and all related products).
Not sure about 2016, but the 2012 version of Express did have a SKU that included SSRS. There are some limitations to the version. A looong time ago I wrote a utility[0] to work around some of those limitations as we had the licensed version but we were working with partners who had Express.
There are also some questions/answers on StackOverflow [1] that suggest you can mostly get by with doing SSIS stuff against the Express version as well, but you don't get all the capabilities.
What's interesting about MS too, is that depending on what you do, the production versions still aren't that much money. If you do any sort of commercial software development, MS will pretty much give you a bunch of free software (including MSSQL to a point) just to keep you on the stack and to advertise that you use their products over others. Between BizSpark and the Partnership Network, it's very reasonable.