Do you wish to understand what Microsoft Power BI is? Do you want to understand the importance of Microsoft Power BI DirectQuery and how you can set it up to directly connect to your data sources? If yes, then you’ve come to the right place.
Data Visualization is an essential aspect of today’s digital era. It helps businesses recognize emerging trends and respond rapidly. These patterns make a lot more sense when represented graphically. This is because visuals and diagrams make it easier for them to identify and understand all strongly correlated attributes.
Even though are a lot of relations that are obvious, there are others that need to be recognized and clarified to help businesses concentrate on a particular data point that can have an effect on their profits. This helps businesses save time and solve problems more efficiently.
There are numerous Data Visualization tools that are available on the market. One of the most well-known tools is Microsoft Power BI. This article will provide you with an understanding of what Microsoft Power BI is and how you can directly query your data sources to perform analysis and create visualizations using Microsoft Power BI DirectQuery.
Table of Contents
What is Microsoft Power BI?
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Microsoft Power BI is a visualization tool offered by Microsoft to manage and analyze data from different sources and create appealing visualization to provide insights from data. Microsoft Power BI pulls the data from sources and turns them into powerful insights by processing and analyzing them. It helps users measure the performance of their organization and campaigns.
The different variants of Microsoft Power BI are as follows:
- A Windows-based Desktop application known as Power BI Desktop.
- Online Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is known as Power BI Service.
- Mobile Versions are known as Power BI Apps.
Microsoft Power BI is built on the Microsoft Excel Framework, and hence users find it very easy to migrate from Microsoft Excel to Microsoft Power BI. However, the latter is far more potent than its spreadsheet counterpart.
More information on Microsoft Power BI can be found here.
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Key Features of Microsoft Power BI
Microsoft Power BI can be seen as an extension of Microsoft Excel having more power and analytical muscle to perform analysis. Some of the key features of Microsoft Power BI are as follows:
- Microsoft Power BI is a powerful Business Intelligence tool that can ingest the data, analyze them and create visualizations to provide better insights about operations and performances.
- Power BI can quickly process vast volumes of data.
- Has exceptional Machine Learning libraries that help users to perform Predictive Analytics.
- Contains pre-built templates that allow businesses to create an effective dashboard for in-depth analysis of their data.
- Available in the cloud so that users can access the functionality everywhere.
- Microsoft Power BI allows users to set up alerts to keep users up-to-date on essential metrics and measurements.
- Power BI has a user-friendly interface and allows users to navigate smoothly.
- Microsoft Power BI can integrate with other platforms like Microsoft Office 365, Apache Spark, Apache Hadoop, Google Analytics, Salesforce, MailChimp, and many more.
Prerequisites
- Active Microsoft Power BI setup. You can find and download various versions of Microsoft Power BI from here.
- Basic understanding of data and visualization.
- Connection details for the data source.
Steps to Set Up Microsoft Power BI DirectQuery
Microsoft Power BI Desktop allows users to import a copy of the data and apply all the analytical queries to perform analysis. However, it also enables users to connect to data sources directly and execute the required queries.
Microsoft has segregated the data sources supported by Microsoft Power BI to perform direct queries and are listed in Microsoft Power BI Data Sources.
Follow the below step-by-step guide to see how you can connect data sources and set up Microsoft Power BI DirectQuery.
- Step 1: Launch Microsoft Power BI Desktop.
- Step 2: Navigate to the Home ribbon and select Get Data > SQL Server or any other data source as per your requirements.
Image Source: Microsoft Docs
- Step 3: A dialogue box will appear that asks to select the Data Connectivity option, i.e. “Import” or “DirectQuery.”
- Step 4: Add server details, and database name, and select “DirectQuery.”
- Step 5: Click “OK” to create the necessary connections.
The differences between Import and Power BI DirectQuery are as follows:
- Import: When selecting the import option, the selected tables and columns will be imported to Microsoft Power BI, which means the data will be transferred from the data source to Microsoft Power BI Desktop. You can create a visualization on top of it. Any changes in the source data will be reflected only upon refresh.
- DirectQuery: In the case of Microsoft Power BI DirectQuery, there is no copy of the data source but a logical connection will be created between Microsoft Power BI and the data source. You can create visualizations on this data, and as it is a live connection between Microsoft Power BI and the data source, you will always view the up-to-date visualizations.
Benefits of Using Microsoft Power BI DirectQuery
In the above section, you have seen how to connect data sources via Microsoft Power BI DirectQuery. Using Microsoft Power BI DirectQuery has many benefits; some of them are as follows:
- Microsoft Power BI DirectQuery helps you create visualization over huge datasets without creating any copies, thereby providing faster access to data.
- Microsoft Power BI DirectQuery uses Live Data Connection, and hence the data will always be up-to-date. Whereas in the case of Import, the data can be stale as it requires a frequent refresh to fetch the latest data.
- There are no data size limitations for Microsoft Power BI DirectQuery.
Limitations of Using Microsoft Power BI DirectQuery
As you know, for every pro, there are some cons associated with it. The same is with Microsoft Power BI DirectQuery as well. The limitations of using Microsoft Power BI DirectQuery are as follows:
- Complex queries tend to produce errors. To remove the error, you either need to simplify the query or import the data rather than using the DirectQuery approach.
- In Microsoft Power BI DirectQuery, Single Sign-On is not supported for calculated tables and columns.
- Calculations and transformation on Date/Time columns are not supported in Microsoft Power BI DirectQuery. For example, drilling the data by year, month, and date isn’t supported in Direct Query mode.
- There is a limit of 1 million rows in Microsoft Power BI DirectQuery. If over 1 million rows are returned from DirectQuery Aggregations, Microsoft Power BI returns an error.
Conclusion
This article provided you with an in-depth understanding of what Microsoft Power BI is and how you can set up Microsoft Power BI DirectQuery to access your data sources directly.
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