Overview of Power BI

Power BI is a Microsoft Product. Power BI is a visualization tool used to analyze and represent data in visualization form. Microsoft Power BI is used to find insights and analytics within an organization's data. Power BI can help us to connect with different data sources such as databases, Files, URLs, API, and Sharepoint and build data sets, transform and clean the data into a data model, and create charts or graphs, Tables, and Metrix to provide visuals of the data.

Power BI is a collection of services, apps, and connectors that work together and form visualization from unrelated data and interactive insights. Data may be an Excel format, Object, JSON, or URL and any database like SQL Server, Oracle, Teradata, etc. Power BI easily connects to your data sources, and visualization data in a dashboard can be shared with anyone.

Elements of Power BI

Below is the list of basic elements of Power BI which helps to Design, Create, Share, and Consume business insights and Analytics in the most effectively

Download and Installation of Microsoft Power BI Desktop

Download Microsoft Power BI 64-bit (PBIDesktopSetup_x64.exe) from the below link and install it on your system. Once installation is done start building the Dashboard using different Data sources.

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

Installation Steps

How to connect Power BI with Data Source?

Once Power BI dashboard you are ready to connect with various data sources. The below image shows how to connect with the data source select Home from Riboon and click on Get Data->Select Data Source

SQL Server database

Select the data source as per your choice here I am selecting Import data from the Sql server. Just click on Connect. Once you click on connect it asks for your Sql Server server details as below give the Sql server server name and select data Connectivity mode. Click on the ok button once ok after the server user ID and password and then connect

Data connectivity mode


Import mode

Import Data Connectivity mode import data into the Power BI cache. Import connection is recommended when the data size is less than 1 GB and the data is not frequently changed. In Import mode schedule refresh is used to get the latest data. Import mode of connection provides you high performance as compared to direct query mode.

Direct query mode

DirectQuery Connectivity mode is directly connected to the database and data. DirectQuery mode is used when the data volume is large and data will be changed frequently. It provides real-time solutions. In direct query mode, every time a query is triggered in the database, and fetches the latest data from the database which reduces performance as every time hits to database.

SQL Server database details

Select the Database and set of tables or views from which you want to build a dashboard

Navigator

You can load data or transform data. Once you load data it creates a dataset of your data without changes. But if you want to do some customization in the table then you need to click on transform data and you can change data type add column transform data and many more then click on close apply. Once closed and applied, a new dataset is created with the changes you have made.

File

Report build

Once the data is loaded after changes made in the table you can begin with build reports.

Sections in Report View