Tag: Power BI Admin

Azure SQL Database, Data Visualisation, Dataflows, Fabric Administrator, Lakehouse, Microsoft Fabric, Notebook, OneLake, Power BI, Power BI Desktop, Power BI Embedded Capacity, Power BI Premium Capacity, Power BI Service, Power Query, Self-Service BI, Synapse Data Engineering, Synapse Data Science, Synapse Data Warehouse

Unveiling Microsoft Fabric’s Impact on Power BI Developers and Analysts

Unveiling Microsoft Fabric’s Impact on Power BI Developers and Analysts

Microsoft Fabric is a new platform designed to bring together the data and analytics features of Microsoft products like Power BI and Azure Synapse Analytics into a single SaaS product. Its goal is to provide a smooth and consistent experience for both data professionals and business users, covering everything from data entry to gaining insights. A new data platform comes with new keywords and terminologies, so to get more familiar with some new terms in Microsoft Fabric, check out this blog post.

As mentioned in one of my previous posts, Microsoft Fabric is built upon the Power BI platform; therefore we expect it to provide ease of use, strong collaboration, and wide integration capabilities. While Microsoft Fabric is getting more attention in the market, so we see more and more organisations investigating the possibilities of migrating their existing data platforms to Microsoft Fabric. But what does it mean for seasoned Power BI developers? What about Power BI professional users such as data analysts and business analysts? In this post, I endeavor to answer those questions.

I have been blogging predominantly around Microsoft Data Platforms and especially Power BI since 2013. But I have never written about the history of Power BI. I believe it makes sense to touch upon the history of Power BI to better understand the size of its user base and how introducing a new data platform that includes Power BI can affect them. A quick search on the internet provides some interesting facts about it. So let’s take a moment and talk about it.

The history of Power BI

Power BI started as a top-secret project at Microsoft in 2006 by Thierry D’Hers and Amir Netz. They wanted to make a better way to analyse data using Microsoft Excel. They called their project “Gemini” at first.

In 2009, they released PowerPivot, a free extension for Excel that supports in-memory data processing. This made it faster and easier to do calculations and create reports. PowerPivot got quickly popular among Excel users, but it had some limitations. For example, it was hard to share large Excel files with others, and it was not possible to update the data automatically.

In 2015, Microsoft combined PowerPivot with another extension called Power Query, which lets users get data from different sources and clean it up. They also added a cloud service that lets users publish and share their reports online. They called this new product Power BI, which stands for Power Business Intelligence.

In the past few years, Power BI grasped a lot of attention in the market and improved a lot to cover more use cases and business requirements from data transformation, data modelling, and data visualisation to combining all these goods with the power of AI and ML to provide predictive and prescriptive analysis.

Who are Power BI Users?

Since its birth, Power BI has become one of the most popular and powerful data analysis and data visualisation tools in the world used by a wide variety of users. In the past few years, Power BI generated many new roles in the job market, such as Power BI developer, Power BI consultant, Power BI administrator, Power BI report writer, and whatnot, as well as helping many others by making their lives easier, such as data analysts and business analysts. With Power BI, the data analysts could efficiently analyse the data and make recommendations based on their findings. Business analysts could use Power BI to focus on more practical changes resulting from their analysis of the data and show their findings to the business much quicker than before. As a result, millions of users interact with Power BI on a daily basis in many ways. So, introducing a new data platform that sort of “Swallows Power BI” may sound daunting to those whose daily job relates to content creation, maintenance, or administrating Power BI environments. For many, the fear is real. But shall the developers and analysts be afraid of Microsoft Fabric? The short answer is “Absolutely not!”. Does it change the way we used to work with Power BI? Well, it depends.

To answer these questions, we first need to know who are Power BI users and how they interact with it.

Continue reading “Unveiling Microsoft Fabric’s Impact on Power BI Developers and Analysts” →
Dataflows, Power BI, Power BI Service, Power Query

Endorsement in Power BI, Part 2, How to Endorse?

Endorsement in Power BI, Part 2, How to Endorse?

In the previous post I explained the basic concepts around endorsement in Power BI. We discussed that users’ ability to collaborate in creating and sharing artifacts is one of the key aspects of users’ experience in Power BI. But it would be hard, if not impossible, to identify the quality of the artifact without a mechanism to identify the artifact’s quality in large organisations. Endorsement is the answer to this challenge. We discussed the following in the previous post:

In this post, I explain the following:

How do Power BI administrators enable certification and grant rights to security groups?

In the previous post, we discussed that a Power BI administrator must enable certification and grant sufficient rights to the security groups. Therefore, all members of the specified security group are authorised to certify the artifacts. If you are a Power BI administrator, follow these steps to do so:

  1. After logging into Power BI Service, click the Settings button
  2. Click Admin Portal
  3. From the Tenant settings, scroll down to find the Export and sharing settings
  4. Find and expand the Certification setting
  5. Enable certification
  6. Put the certification process documentation URL (if any)
  7. It is not recommended to enable this feature for the entire organisation. So, select the Specific security groups option
  8. Type the security group name and select it from the list
  9. Click the Apply button

The following image shows the above steps:

Enabling certification from the Admin Portal in Power BI Service
Enabling certification from the Admin Portal in Power BI Service

It may take up to 15 minutes for the changes to go through. After that, all the members of the specified security can certify the artifacts. In the next section, we see how to certify the supported artifacts.

Note

Everyone who has “write” permission on the Workspace containing the artifact can promote it. Therefore, the users or security groups with one of the Admin, Member, or Contributor roles in the Workspace can promote the artifacts.

However, one should not promote the artifacts just because he/she can. The organisations usually have a promotion process to follow, but the boundaries around promoting are often much more relaxed than certifying it.

Continue reading “Endorsement in Power BI, Part 2, How to Endorse?” →
Data Visualisation, Dataflows, DAX, Power BI, Power BI Desktop, Power BI Embedded Capacity, Power BI Governance, Power BI Paginated, Power BI Premium Capacity, Power BI Service, Power Query, Self-Service BI

Power BI 101, What Should I Learn?

This is the second part of my new series of Power BI posts named Power BI 101. In the previous post, I briefly discussed what Power BI is. In this post, I look into one of the most confusing parts for those who want to start learning Power BI. Many people jump straight online and look for Power BI training courses which there are plenty out there. But which one is the right training course for you? Let’s find out.

What do you want to gain from learning Power BI?

Regardless of attending paid training courses or being a self-learner, the above question is one of the most important questions you might ask yourself before going to the next steps. The answer to this question dictates the sort of training you must look for. Your answer to the preceding question can be one or none of the following:

  • I am a graduate/student looking at the job market
  • I am a business analyst and I want to know how Power BI can help you with my daily job
  • I am a database developer and I want to learn more about business intelligence and data and analytics space
  • I am a non-Microsoft Business Intelligence developer and I want to start learning more about Microsoft offerings
  • I am a system admin and I have to manage our Power BI tenant
  • I am a data scientist and I want to know how I can use Power BI
  • I am just ciourious to see what Power BI can do for me

As mentioned, your answer might not be any of the above, but, thinking about your reason(s) for learning Power BI can help you to find the best way to learn and use Power BI more efficiently. You can spend time and money taking some online courses and get even more confused. You don’t want that do you?

So, whatever reason(s) you have in mind to learn Power BI, most probably you fall into one of the following user categories:

Think about your goal(s) and what you want to achieve by learning Power BI then try to identify your user category. For instance, if you are a student thinking of joining an IT company as a data and analytics developer, then your user category is most probably a Power BI Developer or a Contributor.

To help you find out your user category let’s see what the above user categories mean.

Power BI Developers

The Power BI Developers are the beating hearts of any Power BI development project. Regardless of the project you will be involved with, you definitely require to have a certain level of knowledge of the following:

  • Data preparation/ETL processes
  • Data warehousing
  • Data modelling/Star schema
  • Data visualisation

To be a successful Power BI developer you must learn the following languages in Power BI:

  • Power Query
  • DAX

Depending on the types of projects you will be involved in, you may require to learn the following languages as well:

  • Microsoft Visual Basic (for Paginated Reports)
  • Python
  • R
  • T-SQL
  • PL/SQL

As a Power BI developer, you will write a lot of Power Query and DAX expressions. Most probably you require to learn T-SQL as well. The following resources can be pretty helpful:

Continue reading “Power BI 101, What Should I Learn?” →
Business Intelligence - BI, Power BI, Power BI Desktop, Power BI Governance, Power BI Service, Self-Service BI

Power BI Governance, Good Practices, Part 2: Version Control with OneDrive, Teams and SharePoint Online

Power BI Governance, Version Control with OneDrive for Business, Microsoft Teams and SharePoint Online

One of the most important aspects of the software development life cycle is to have control over different versions of a solution, especially in a project where there is more than one developer involved in the implementation. Just like when you normally create a project in visual studio and you commit the changes back to a source control system like GitHub or Azure DevOps, it’s advised to keep the history of different versions of your Power BI reports. What we expect from a source control solution is to keep tracking of all changes happening in the source code while developing a project. So you can easily roll back to a previous state if you like to. 

The other benefit of having a source control process in place is when multiple developers are working on a single project. Every single one of them makes changes in the source code then they commit all the changes into the source control server without overwriting each others’ work. 

With Power BI things are a bit different though. Power BI report files are PBIX files which are stored in binary format (well, PBIX is basically a zip file isn’t it?) which at the time of writing this post, there is no official way to enforce Power BI source control in any source control solutions like GitHub or Azure DevOps (YET). 

Microsoft announced a fantastic feature last week (6/05/2020) named “Deployment Pipelines” which does exactly what we’re after, but it is currently a preview feature which is only available only to organisations with Power BI Premium. So it is out of the game for the majority of us.

Having said that, there is still a way to keep history of changes in the shape of different versions of PBIX files. This is called Version Control.

There are several ways you can enable version control over your PBIX files while developing the report. Regardless of the version control platform you need to think about having multiple environments and who can access them for doing what.

EnvironmentAccessible toDescription
DevelopmentDevelopersData modellers and report writers access this environment for development purposes.  
User Acceptance Test (UAT)Developers, SMEs, Technical Leads, Power BI AdminsAfter the development is finished the developers deploy the solution to the UAT environment. The solution will then be tested by SMEs (Subject Matter Experts) to make sure the business requirements are met.
Pre-prod (Optional but recommended)Technical Leads, Power BI AdminsAfter the solution passed all UAT testing scenarios Technical Leads or Power BI Admins will deploy it to Pre-prod for final checks to make sure all data sources are correctly pointing to production data sources and all reports and dashboards are working as expected.  
ProductionTechnical Leads, Power BI Admins, End UsersAfter pre-prod checks completed Technical Leads or Power BI Admins deploy the solution to the Production environment which is then available to the end users.

Version Control Options

If your organisation does not have a Premium capacity then “Deployment Pipelines” feature is not available to you. So you need to come up with a solution though. In this section I name some Version Control options available to you

  • OneDrive for Business
  • Microsoft Teams/SharePoint Online
Continue reading “Power BI Governance, Good Practices, Part 2: Version Control with OneDrive, Teams and SharePoint Online” →