POWDER BI :

Power BI is a Data Visualization and Business Intelligence tool that converts data from different data sources to interactive dashboards and BI reports. Power BI suite provides multiple software, connector, and services - Power BI desktop, Power BI service based on Saas, and mobile Power BI apps available for different platforms. These set of services are used by business users to consume data and build BI reports. This tutorial covers all the important concepts in Power BI and provides a foundational understanding on how to use Power BI.

Power BI desktop app is used to create reports, while Power BI Services (Software as a Service - SaaS) is used to publish the reports, and Power BI mobile app is used to view the reports and dashboards.

Power BI Desktop is available in both 32-bit and 64-bit versions. To download the latest version, you can use the following link -

https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/downloads/

WHAT IS POWER BI

 

Power BI is a collection of software services, apps, and connectors that work together to turn your unrelated sources of data into coherent, visually immersive, and interactive insights. Your data may be an Excel spreadsheet, or a collection of cloud-based and on-premises hybrid data warehouses. Power BI lets you easily connect to your data sources, visualize and discover what’s important, and share that with anyone or everyone you want.

diagram showing input sources for Power BI

Power BI Architecture:

Power BI’s architecture has three phases. The first two phases partially use ETL (Extract, Transform and Load) to handle the data. Let us take a look at these phases one by one.

1. Data Integration

An organisation can be required to deal with data that comes from different sources. The data from data sources can be in different file formats. The data is first extracted from different sources which can be your different servers or databases etc. This data is then integrated in a standard format and then stored at a common area called as staging area.

2. Data Processing

The integrated data is still not ready for visualization because the data needs processing before it can be presented. This data is pre-processed or cleaned. For example, missing values or redundant values are removed from the data set. After the data is cleaned, business rules are applied to the data and it is transformed into presentable data. This data is then loaded into the Data Warehouse.

3. Data Presentation

So once the data is loaded and processed now it can be visualized much better with use of various visualizations that Power BI has to offer. Use of reports, dashboards help one represent data in more intuitive manner. These visuals, reports help business end users to take business decisions based on the insights.