What is PowerBi?
Power BI is a business analytics service provided by Microsoft that lets you visualize your data and share insights. It converts data from different sources to build interactive dashboards and Business Intelligence reports.
Why PowerBi?
1. Access to Volumes of Data from Multiple Sources
Power BI can access vast volumes of data from multiple sources. It allows you to view, analyze, and visualize vast quantities of data that cannot be opened in Excel. Some of the important data sources available for Power BI are Excel, CSV, XML, JSON, pdf, etc. Power BI uses powerful compression algorithms to import and cache the data within the.PBIX file.
2. Interactive UI/UX Features
Power BI makes things visually appealing. It has an easy drag-drop functionality, with features that allow you to copy all formatting across similar visualizations.
3. Exceptional Excel Integration
Power BI helps to gather, analyze, publish, and share Excel business data. Anyone familiar with Office 365 can easily connect Excel queries, data models, and reports to Power BI Dashboards.
4. Accelerate Big Data Preparation with Azure
Using Power BI with Azure allows you to analyze and share massive volumes of data. An azure data lake can reduce the time it takes to get insights and increase collaboration between business analysts, data engineers, and data scientists.
5. Turn Insights into Action
Power BI allows you to gain insights from data and turn those insights into actions to make data-driven business decisions.
6. Real-time Stream Analytics
Power BI will enable you to perform real-time stream analytics. It helps you fetch data from multiple sensors and social media sources to get access to real-time analytics, so you are always ready to make business decisions.
PowerBi over Tableau
Power BI is one of the most popular platforms to explore and visualize your data, but does this make it a perfect fit for your business? To help you make the right choice, we have outlined some important points below for you to consider.
Price
Power BI is priced at only $10 per user per month making it a pocket-friendly choice for solopreneurs as well as SMEs. At just $10, users gain access to a wide array of features such as real-time dashboard building capability, shared data collaboration, automatic data updating and much more. Power BI comes with a free version called Power BI desktop which helps users start their data visualization journey. Tableau is priced at $35 for similar features.
ETL/Data Discovery Suite
Power BI has a robust set of tools for ETL and data discovery when compared to Tableau. Data prep is 90% of any reporting requirement. Reporting datamarts can be directly built into Power BI without having to go to third parties.
Custom Visualisations
Data visualization is the key to providing actionable insights. Power BI lets you create your custom visualization allowing you to explore and display your data in captivating ways. Apart from creating custom visualizations, you can also download visuals created by the community and by Microsoft. These visuals can be downloaded and used in your reports.
Tableau’s in-built visuals may be the best in their class, but even a market leader like Tableau does not allow you the flexibility to create custom visualizations.
MSFT Integration
Power BI is tightly integrated with the O365/Azure offerings and everything Microsoft, making it compelling for shops that run on O365 or Azure. This proves to be a huge advantage for analytics shops that are excel driven, but that need data from the same source as Power BI based reporting.
Q&A capability
Power BI is the only product that offers Natural Language Query capabilities. This Natural Language Query is surprisingly robust. You simply type a question and Power BI selects the appropriate visualization for you to explore. What’s even more amazing is that the visualization chosen may or may not have been created by the dashboard’s author. This is a game-changing feature and will make data accessibility ubiquitous.
Visualization
Power BI offers a robust library of visualization types and its open framework allows users to add more visualizations to their collections via the office store. Advanced users can also implement d3.js and R visuals. Since it was developed on top of Excel, it shares many of the same controls.
Ease of Use / Adoption
Power BI has a higher adoption rate among newbies. This is because anyone who has ever used Microsoft’s products before will feel right at home in Power BI. Its user interface resembles that of Microsoft Excel making it easy to navigate for first-timers. Power BI has an intuitive learning curve and also utilizes Microsoft’s DAX query language which will be familiar to advanced users of Excel. While Tableau is easy to navigate once you become familiar with its layout, the marks menu takes time to master.
Ease of sharing reports
Power BI Pro allows users to create and share rich interactive reports on the Power BI.com service. This makes collaboration among team members and colleagues easy. Tableau, on the other hand, has some inbuilt sharing option that lacks customization capabilities when compared to Power BI.
Data is critical to any business success, but it is always an overwhelming process to extract meaningful insights. Power BI simplifies this data to insights cycle from both the adoption and cost perspective.
Why SSIS?
SQL Server Integration Services is a platform for building enterprise-level data integration and data transformations solutions. Use Integration Services to solve complex business problems by copying or downloading files, loading data warehouses, cleansing and mining data, and managing SQL Server objects and data. Even today there are a high number of projects in the IT Industry relying on an older system like SSIS basically because of the following key factors:
1. Transformations
Transformations were never this simple until Microsoft introduced their highly capable tool SSIS. Simply drag and drop the transformations you want to add and create a pipeline. There is nothing called 'Complex Transformation', even the most complex transformations can be solved with simplicity using the SSIS.
2. Connect to traditional Data Sources
SSIS offers an inbuilt connection to the traditional Data Sources. The availability of these connections makes sure you are up and ready for development activities as soon as you install SSIS.
3. Pricing
SSIS is simply one of the most affordable but capable ETL tools available in the Industry. They have offered several editions from the Express and Developers edition to the Enterprise editions.
4. Seamless connectivity with Microsoft Services
If your project is in a Microsoft environment, you will not be disappointed to pick another Microsoft tool basically because of the seamless connectivity it will offer. Powerbi is another Microsoft reporting solution apart from Paginated reports and SSRS. The experience this tool offers with the reporting services is flawless, without a doubt.
Housing Partnership Network Knowledge Center
(Power BI based self service analytics platform using Microsoft Azure and SSIS)
Objective
Housing and Partnership Network, also known as HPN is our active development project for the last two years. Our objective was not only to develop this complete system from scratch but also to maintain the system for the client, understand the business processes and develop new reporting solutions along with the ad-hoc improvements.
Summary
The solutions were designed to fit the project in the client's budget. This project was completely stacked on Salesforce and Microsoft. The source of our data was Salesforce which the client was making use of as a CRM tool. Data was expected to ingest into Data Warehouse using Microsoft's ETL tool SSIS and later be processed into the PowerBi for reporting requirements. There were a few key challenges to this complete process, summarized as follows:
Complete Automation Data was expected to be loaded into Datawarehouse and be reported daily. The problem with such a daily running system is that you want to eliminate all the corner cases to ensure that the package will not be failing even for a single day. Keeping that in mind we introduced a complete rollback plan and made the debugging process smooth along with some other key improvements. This helps us to identify and troubleshoot the problems in simple steps and then to provide a spontaneous fix.
OLTP and OLAP Reporting was expected to be done for historical as well as current records. Logically this is categorized as two separate systems fit together in the Data Warehouse. Both systems come up with their own set of technical challenges and merging them both is just a cherry on top. This challenge is not only limited to the reporting requirements but plays a key role while developing your ETL pipelines. How you develop your system or its architecture is probably the most important building block for any system.
CSV Historical Loads The client had captured the historical snapshots in an excel file to be used as a base for our newly ingested data. We need to design the system to as if it was running on a past date for the CSV historical inputs to get the expected results. This can get very tricky and can give you surprises at a later date if not done properly. It was one of those aspects of the project which you can only test completely after designing the solution.
Data Marts As per the requirement, we needed to develop different Data Marts to achieve various reporting objectives. Designing a Data Mart is one thing but effectively designing the Data Mart plays a major role. A good Data Mart will have a minimal number of underlying tables, effective use of architectural design and reusing the same table across multiple Data Marts while keeping the solution simple.
Ad-hoc Requests There were several ad-hoc requests by the client as part of the improvement process on various instances. We redesigned our solutions according to our client's requirements time again. This flexibility to adapt provides any business with a better trajectory of growth.
Each project is unique and comes with its own business as well as technical challenges. However, the experience you provide to a client should always be smooth, and that can only come with realistically planning the work.