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I haven't worked with Power BI's paginated reports but I'm trying to migrate from SQL Server to Azure SQL. Getting Power BI per-user licenses just for users to be able to generate a report PDF is prohibitively expensive for us.

Is it possible to use Power BI service API in a similar way to SSRS Report Server where you just make a request to generate the report and return the result?

We don't need to embed the paginated reports... just call the service API with the specified params and return the generated report (like SSRS Report Server).

Really hoping to use a single Premium license for the Azure Active Directory App Service registration to avoid needing to have a per-user license for every user that just needs to click a button and generate an invoice.

Essentially this, but with Power BI Paginated Reports: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/reporting-services/export-a-report-using-url-access?view=sql-server-ver16

I'm asking just to see if I'm wasting my time by digging further into this. Thanks in advance!

Aaron Carlson
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    This is what [Export to file API](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/rest/api/power-bi/reports/export-to-file-in-group) does. – Andrey Nikolov Nov 17 '22 at 06:31
  • Thank you @AndreyNikolov. We are looking into that "Export to file API" service. We've been looking for a good solution for several smaller clients as they migrate away from on-prem SQL Servers to Azure SQL but the costs of Power BI licenses to use Paginated Reports, especially for smaller clients with SAAS offerings aren't well received. We may just look into standing up a small VM that just runs SSRS and point that to the Azure SQL databases we want to run reports on. – Aaron Carlson Nov 17 '22 at 15:09

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