Basic Concepts of Power BI
Check my previous post about introduction to Power BI before going through this article.
Creating a report and dashboards are very easy in Power BI by simply pointing to the correct data source.
Levels in Power BI,
1. Create a dataset
2. Create a report on top of above dataset
3. Create a dashboard – Just pin a charts to display in dashboard from report.
Power BI is an application which we can use in online as well as in desktop. The steps provided in my previous article (Link) is for online version of Power BI.
To download the desktop version, click here. It has more options compare than online version.
Power BI has gateways which helps to keep the data fresh by connecting the on-premises data sources. It provides the flexibility to individuals as well as organization.
7 key habits, practice & experience, which made Bill Gates succeed
I just flipped through my phone and found this amazing article which might be a great energy re-charge for many youngsters today. This clearly talked about the key habits, practise and experience from Bill Gates that helped him succeed. This is just a simple formulae for all of us to do, what we do should have hard core dedication & hard work to succeed. The main 7 key points highlighted are
- Get in early – and learn
- Seek forgiveness, not permission
- Value your work
- Learning matters more than school
- When you’re in charge, take charge
- Be the guy who predicts the future
- Take on a big enough mission.
What a great re-invention that we should really apply in our day to day life. I sincerely advise and suggest to all of you who don’t do this or have done this in the past but don’t do it anymore, to restart in doing the same.
All the very best.
Introduction to Power BI
Power BI is one of the best visualization tool and it can be used by anyone. Initially this tool was available for office 365 SharePoint site. It was something like an add-on but now they have upgraded and it is available externally.
Power BI team from Microsoft has put their ideas and innovations to make this tool available to everyone and it is not required much technical knowledge to use.
There are lots of improvement has been taking place from day one of power BI by Microsoft power BI team.
Steps to Use Power BI
- Visit https://powerbi.microsoft.com/
- Scroll down and look for option “Use it free”
- Enter work email (xxxxx@xxxx.com), it won’t support personal email
- Click “Use it free” and email will be received from power BI and follow the instructions.
Purpose of Columnstore Index in SQL Server 2012
Nowadays, data being generated and captured across many devices, applications and services. Now every organization is tasked with storing massive amounts of data to accelerate their business growth success.
Using traditional tools to capture and process the data is very challenging and it is not going to be one time activity because all data users want to see continuous growth.
We have below issues while doing this task.
- The Volume of data is high, so the ability of data warehouses to execute the queries within a time is not achievable.
- More time is required to Tune the queries.
- Designing and maintaining multiple indexes.
In many cases, so much of time elapsed between the time the query start executed and time to render the result.
To overcome the above issues, Microsoft SQL Server team worked on columnstore Index, which allow very large data set to be read quickly.
The performance of the columnstore index is far better than normal index. This has been introduced in Microsoft SQL Server 2012.
Microsoft Visualization Tools
There are many visualization tools available from different companies.
Microsoft always concentrates more on visualization tools because visual tools are going to play a major role in the future.
What is the use of visualization tools?
visualization tools to visualize and analyze the data in an easy way. In this digitized environment, we are producing data from different kinds of machines and gadgets which are not easy to process and understand. To understand those data, we need to process first and once we get proper format, then using visualization tools, we can able to understand.
Microsoft innovations are always awesome since those are very easy to learn and use. The most famous tool from Microsoft is office tools, in that Microsoft excel is the best which can be used from very basic users to advanced users.
In excel, Microsoft added a few more options in terms of visualization. Those options are,
- Power Query
- Power View
- Power Map
- Power BI
Data Visualization in Microsoft Excel
Data is the most valuable asset in almost all the places.
Understanding the data is not easy for a layman. Visualization tools are playing a vital role to make the layman to understand about the data. Most of business decisions based on best data visualization.
This article speaks about simple visuals based on data about cancer statistics.
Just collected a few facts about the estimated number of new cancer cases in US 2015.
Ref: http://www.cancer.org/acs/groups/content/@editorial/documents/document/acspc-044552.pdf
Visualization tools always helping us to see the facts very clearly. I just converted the data to graphs by using simple and effective Microsoft Excel.
Estimated New Cases for Both Male and Female:
Estimated New cases for Male Vs Female:
This is just to help you understand the facts about cancer diseases.
Learning Steps:
- Get the data from above reference link, copy and paste the data in Microsoft Excel sheet (it can be any version).
- Select the columns and rows and click the “Format as Table” ( Option available in Home tab & Styles section)
- If you want to see the chart for sites with Male, just hide the both sexes and Female columns by clicking right click on column B and D.
- Select the data from cell A1 to C16
- Go to insert tab which is next to Home on top and click the pie chart on chart section.
- Pie chart appeared for selected data. Try to check with other chart formats.
Hyperscale technology lets a DBA sleep, +30 minutes a day!
Ease of access and easy life is now possible with On-premises and hybrid cloud technology with SQL Server 2016.
Tired of connecting on-prem & cloud data? Take a DB stretch
Save your time and cost on storages and get extra time to relax with this brand new stretch database concept within SQL Server 2016.
You can stretch your legs and relax and get a quick session on delivering your analytics against hot, warm & cold data. Stretch Database is the new concept, which allows you to stretch from on-prem to cloud easily. You can easily enable / disable data stretch, accessing data using stretch database, setup remote data archiving, basic concepts on enabling database/table and backup & restore for the stretch enabled databases.
Stretch DB also covers the concepts of Shallow & Deep backups. However, Deep backups are not supported with SQL Server 2016 CTP2.
You can download the latest CTP 3.2 from this link.