Category: Power BI

On-premises Data Gateway Personal Mode, Power BI, Power BI Desktop, Power BI Web App

MySQL and Power BI, How Does It Work?

MySQL and Power BI

Update 1: At the time of writing this blog post (Aug 2015) Power BI Service called Power BI Web. I hope it doesn’t make any confusions.

Update 2: MySQL data source is available in “On-premises Data Gateway – Enterprise Mode” as well. So if you are setting this up for an organisation, then “Personal Mode” (AKA Power BI Personal Gateway) would not be suitable. When I wrote this blog post only “Power BI Personal Gateway” was available.

In this post I explain how to use MySQL and Power BI. This post covers the following areas:

  • Get data from MySQL
  • Schedule refresh on-premises MySQL from power BI web app

First of all I’d like to mention that in this post I use AdventureWorksDW which is imported into MySQL. If you want to do so you can use “Migration Wizard” from “Database” menu on MySQL Workbench.

MySQL and Power BI

I’m not going to explain the migration process as it’s out of scope.

How MySQL and Power BI work together

MySQL is one of the world’s most popular relational database management systems (RDBMS) widely used by the industry. It’s open source, works with many different system platforms including Microsoft Windows and Linux. So it is worth to have a look at it and see how it works with Power BI.

Luckily Microsoft provided the built-in connector in Power BI Desktop. This is how it works all together:

MySQL and Power BI

I’d like to say that it’s not necessary to create reports in Power BI Desktop. You can get data from a MySQL database then publish it to the Power BI cloud then setup a schedule data refresh in the Power BI web app. Then you can create your reports and dashboards on the cloud and share them with your colleagues very easily.

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Power BI, Power BI Desktop, Power BI Web App, Power Query

Data Visualisation with Power BI Desktop

As most of you guys know Power BI Desktop is released. I should say, it’s awesome. There are heaps of changes in compare with its preview edition Power BI Designer. I’ve written a series of posts regarding creating a report and dashboard using Power BI Designer before. You can find them here. Now I want to explain the same thing in Power BI Desktop. I’ll cover lots of new features in this post and I hope you enjoy it.

Get Data

  • Open Power BI Desktop
  • Click on Get Data. You can also get data from recent data sources or even open a predefined report stored in pbix format

Power BI Desktop 01

  • We use Adventure Works DW 2012 database as sample, you can open your real world data source
  • Click on “SQL Server Database” then “Connect”
  • In this sample we are connecting to a “SQL Server Database”
  • Click “Connect”

Power BI Desktop 02

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Power BI, Power BI Web App

Power BI 2.0 is Almost Here

As you might already know Microsoft announced Power BI 2.0 General Availability, Power BI 2.0 GA, on July 24. In this post I explain some new features that are ready to use now. Now I can say Power BI is significantly improved during the preview period. We are able to refresh on-prem datasets, we can modify the look and feel of the reports, we can share resources and much more now. For instance go to Power BI website and the first thing you can see is the Power BI logo is changed from Power BI Preview to Power BI.

power bi 01

Let’s see what is new in Power BI.

Get Data

  • Sign into Power BI
  • Click on Get Data button from the bottom of the left navigation panepower bi 02

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On-premises Data Gateway Personal Mode, Power BI

Power BI Personal Gateway, Five Things You Must Know

When we are talking about using a new technology we need to understand it first. Power BI Personal Gateway is not an exception.  Despite you can easily install the Power BI Personal Gateway, knowing the following important points is crucial. I believe the following 5 points are significantly important to prevent you getting into troubles with the installation process as well as using the gateway:

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  • Power BI Personal Gateway is only available on 64-bit Windows operating systems
  • Once you install Power BI Personal Gateway you don’t need to install another one as just one gateway works for any number of supported data sources
  • You CANNOT install the Power BI Management Gateway on the same machine as Power BI Analysis Services Gateway
  • If you’re trying to install the Power BI Personal Gateway on a network having Active Directory make sure that the account you’re using to install the Power BI Personal Gateway is able to “Logon as a Service”. In some cases the “Logon as a Service” policy is prevented on Active Directory for security reasons. The “Log on as a Service” should be applied to those accounts that are NOT under an Active Directory. So even if you are using a Local Account you should make sure that the local account is added to the local security policy “Log on as a Service”. If the account used to install the Power BI Personal Gateway is banned from the “Log on as a Service” policy you’ll get “Service ‘Data Management Gateway Service’ (DIAHostService) failed to start. Verify that you have sufficient privileges to start system services.” error message.

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