May be this is stupid question.
I am using Sisense for the analytics. Back end is SQL Server. Now we are thinking to move to Power BI. When I search for Power BI I see different versions. 1) desktop power bi 2) azure power bi.
Does both are same ? I can search for tutorial on google but I want some perfect direction. I want the similar kind feature that's sisense have.
Thank you.
Years ago I used a BI product called Hyperion Interactive Reporting. It allowed me to connect to a data source and create data models from which I would create reports. So far, sounds like Power BI right?
It also had the ability to connect to a metadata repository database. This database would contain data that mapped the actual, often cryptic, table and column names in the database to human-readable, business terms. For example a column that I saw in Hyperion as "Cost Center" may have been in the database as costCenter, work_order, or PROJECT-NUMBER. (It would also allow me to define the default join paths, but let's keep this question smaller.) This provided a way to make report development easier.
In Power BI, I see that I can manually rename columns, one-at-a-time. (And each time I touch something minor like this, Power BI takes several seconds to validate the entire file.) But I also see the need for many models that use the same data sources. So I may be defining the "Cost Center" column a few hundred times (a handful of reports per data set to answer a specific type of question, a few data sets that need Cost Center because the transformations in the model will be different for each type of question, several different combinations of data sources that include Cost Center, etc.)
Is there a way to connect Power BI to a metadata repository? Is there a way in Power BI to say, "Across all of my models/datasets, if I'm using the costCenter column from the Financial database, display Cost Center to the user"?
With about 20,000 columns in my data warehouse and 20,000 reports in my current reporting system, this could become a big deal if we intend to migrate to Power BI.
TLDR; There isn't an easy way to achieve this. What you have now is probably better than you could achieve without a ton of work. If you do try it, use SSAS instead of Power BI Desktop to author models.
Does Power BI have a metadata repository? No. There are tools that can get metadata from Power BI models, but you would have to manually build the metadata repository. If you want a centrally managed environment like this, I would highly recommend using SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) for on premise, or even better, Azure SSAS in the cloud. (Azure SSAS will get new features sooner than SSAS installed on premise.) While Power BI Desktop is a great self-service tool, I wouldn't author in it if I needed to control or report across the environment. There just aren't easy ways to corral all of the Power BI models in a report and it's a much more manual process. SSAS will need IT Support and is a higher cost and you will hit more issues than Power BI Desktop, but you will need it if you need central control. It's possible that more management controls will be added to the PowerBI.com service over time, but as of November 2021, you can't do this easily.
So what's the difference between Power BI Desktop and SSAS? The same Power BI engine in Power BI Desktop also exists in SSAS. When you start Power BI Desktop, it's actually starting a SSAS instance behind the scenes. Using SSAS directly just makes it easier for you to connect to the database behind the scenes and see all the models in the environment from one place, while Power BI Desktop doesn't let you peak behind the scenes and it only loads a single model at a time.
How do you get the metadata? It is an easy thing to get SSAS metadata using Power Query (or any SQL tool) to pull Direct Management View (DMV) data. DMVs are management tables that hold all of the metadata of the model, and you just use SQL commands to get the data. Search on "SSAS DMV" to learn more. I have a Excel file that uses Power Query to pull all the key DMV views for all our models in our servers. It makes it easy to do the kind of analysis as in your example.
For Power BI Desktop, you can connect to the hidden SSAS instance and do the same thing, but the report has to be open to do it, and there is no easy way to refresh the data--you pretty much just repeat the process each time. You will connect via localhost:port_number, and the port number is randomly created each time you start Power BI making it impossible to refresh the data pull. There are External Tools such as DAX Studio, Power BI Helper, and dataMarc's Document Model that make that easier, but there's no easy way to automate building the metadata repository for Power BI Desktop files. I would use SSAS directly rather than trying to automate building a large metadata repository.
What about making changes to models? To my knowledge, there aren't any tools that make it easy to make changes across models, though again, you could manually build them. I don't think I would trust my own tool to automate changes across models though. There's just too much that could go wrong. But if you had the need and the budget, you could build it. Look at tools like Tabular Editor, ALM Toolkit, and Microsoft's SSMS, and read on DevOps pipelines for automating updates. These tools work against SSAS and Power BI Desktop, but again, you have to open the Power BI files to work with those models, which makes automation that much harder to do.
Note that all the external tools I've mentioned except Tabular Editor v3 are free (though Tabular Editor v2 is free). PowerBI.tips is a great place to install all these tools from a single installer.
This question probably has a simple answer that I can not find (I'm very new to Power BI). The scenario is that we have software that runs in the browser (ASP.NET MVC) that is hosted on a client's site on their infrastructure. In this scenario is it possible to distribute a Power BI dashboard that runs a DirectQuery on to Microsoft SQL Server?
Apologies if this is a dumb question. I am currently on chapter one of a book on Power BI and I don't want to proceed if it can't meet this requirement.
Short answer: Yes. Power BI Embedded provides you a set of APIs to embed Power BI reports/dashboards into your own applications.
Long answer: It depends. If you need a total self-hosted solution including Power BI, you'll need to go for Power BI Premium, which can be an order of magnitude more expensive than Power BI Embedded, making it an impractical solution to offer on top of your software.
maybe a clarification and a small correction, embedding of Power BI and Power BI Embedded both start at the same price level. Through Office you purchase a Premium capacity for Powerbi.com starting at a monthly commitment of $650 You can also use the $9.90 PRO license per user. PBIE is purchased through Azure with no commitment so you can start at $1 an hour ($750 a month)
Please start by exploring our developer center to find which solution is the best fit for your needs Power BI Developer Center
Hope this helps
Aviv
Have seen a few mentions on pulling Bloomberg pricing data into Power BI, with most referencing a REST API but I can't seem to find any good examples on how to implement. I have a Bloomberg license, but have been struggling on how to marry the two without pulling Bloomberg data into Excel and then referencing in Power BI. Anyone have any luck on this front?
I'd prefer to avoid the Excel route as I'd like to be able to choose dates, assets, etc in the Power BI report and then refresh dynamically rather than open Excel every time and then refresh the Power BI report.
Thanks in advance.
I'm sure there's a way to load data via R with the Rblpapi library. Might try going down this route. I don't have a license so I'm unable to test.
Documentation here:
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/code/rblpapi.html
You'll be glad to know that Bloomberg Connector is part of Power BI April release !
There does not currently seem to be an easy way of doing this. I have been exploring using C#. I found this tutorial which provides a lot of detail on connecting to the Bloomberg API using C#, and this tutorial on pushing data into Power BI using C#. There might be a way by connecting the concepts in both tutorials. If anyone has any better ideas I would love to hear them.
I am using Power BI Embedded. I have created a .pbix file containing a few tabs worth of visualizations. Each tab contains a TimeLine visualization so I can select timer periods along with several charts and maps.
This arrangement looks good in Power BI Desktop. When I publish the .pbix file to the Power BI website, each tab can be pinned to a dashboard. Pinning a dozen visualizations does not seem to make much sense and seems to suggest that the real idea behind it is to not have many visualizations on each tab and allow the user to pin the visuals they are really interested in. The Power BI presentations I've seen also seems to do this.
My report would end up with dozens of tabs which could get very unwieldy in Power BI Desktop. Is there a right way to go about this? Is there some guidance from Microsoft or a few examples I can look at? How does this affect Power BI Embedded?
Also posted to the Power BI Forums.
Honestly, I don't find multiple tabs to be that unwieldy. Of course, it boils down to personal preference/the preference of your audience. It sounds like you have things arranged nicely.
The Power BI Showcase has some good examples of aesthetically pleasing reports here.
About embedding: from my personal experience, tabs do not show up when embedding a PowerBI dashboard/report in a web application.