Tag: Power BI

On-premises Data Gateway Personal Mode, Power BI, Power BI Desktop, Power Pivot, Power Query

Refreshing On-Prem SQL Server Database on Power BI using Power BI Personal Gateway

image It’s been awhile that lots of us were waiting for this feature. And some of us like me just tried to build it in our way. I spent some time to develop something similar using OData in combination with IIS and Basic Authentication features. Well, it was sort of successful and unsuccessful simultaneously! I mean, I was able to refresh SQL Server data remotely, but, when it came down to refreshing the dataset uploaded into the cloud Power BI it just failed. It was mainly because of the method that Power BI uses to refresh data.

By the way, I’m glad to see that we are finally able to refresh an on-premises SQL Server database from Power BI website. Refreshing data is very crucial for every report and dashboard which is working on top of frequently changing database.  So we need to be able to schedule a data refresh on the cloud. Yesterday Microsoft announced a new gateway specially designed for supporting data refresh for on-premises data sources as below:

  • SQL Server
  • Oracle
  • Teradata
  • IBM DB2
  • PostgreSQL
  • Sybase
  • MySQL
  • SharePoint List
  • SQL Analysis Services Tabular model (uploaded data, not live connections)
  • File (CSV, XML, Text, Excel, Access)
  • Folder
  • Custom SQL/Native SQ

As you see SQL Server is not the only one.

Installing Power BI Personal Gateway

It’s easy to install the Gateway. Just make sure that meet the following requirements:

  • The machine that you’re going to install the Gateway on it should be always up and running
  • You can NOT install the Gateway on the same machine as a Power BI Analysis Services Connector

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Mobile BI, Power BI, Power BI Desktop

Hold Your Dashboards in Your Pocket, Part 2: Use Your Predefined Dashboards on Your Windows Devices

In a previous post, “Hold Your Dashboards in Your Pocket, Part 1: Use Your Predefined Dashboards on Your IOS Devices“, I explained how to use Power BI app on your IOS devices.

In this post I express how to use Power BI app on your Windows devices. It’s relatively easy to install and use the Windows app.

  • Go to www.powerbi.com and click on the “Download from Windows Store” button


  • It automatically leads to the app page on your Windows Store
  • Click Install to install the app


  • After the app installed successfully open it from start menu

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  • Click Sign In


 Continue reading “Hold Your Dashboards in Your Pocket, Part 2: Use Your Predefined Dashboards on Your Windows Devices” →

Mobile BI, Power BI, Power BI Desktop

Hold Your Dashboards in Your Pocket, Part 1: Use Your Predefined Dashboards on Your IOS Devices

Now it is time to take a step further and learn how to access our dashboards from our IOS or Windows devices. Microsoft designed a very good and handy app for IOS and Windows based tablets. At the moment the Windows app is only available for your laptop or on your Windows based tablet device. First of all you need to download the app on your device.

In this post I explain how to use your IOS devices to browse your dashboards everywhere that you have access to the Internet.

iPhone:

  • Sign-in into Microsoft Power BI website
  • From the right menu click on Download then click on “Power BI for IOS”

  • Click “Download on the App Store”

  • Select your IOS device and then click on “View in iTunes”

Continue reading “Hold Your Dashboards in Your Pocket, Part 1: Use Your Predefined Dashboards on Your IOS Devices” →

Power BI, Power Query

Build your First Report in Microsoft Power BI Designer Part 2, Make it More User Friendly

PBID

In this post I would like to explain more details about Power BI Designer features. In the previous post you learnt how to create some very simple reports. However, those reports were just for testing general features of the tool. For instance we didn’t even play with very simple features like renaming the dimension or fact tables and members to user friendly names. In this article not only do I explain some of the simple ones, but also I’ll go through some of the more advanced ones.

Again, as per my previous post, I’m using AdventureWorksDW2012 as a source database.  We imported “Internet Sales” into the designer and we created some reports and one new page and we saved the reports on disc. So we have all the requirements on hand. Let’s go…

Making names more user friendly:

  • Open the *.pbix report file in Power BI Designer
  • Double click on “DimCurrency” to rename it to “Currency”. We need to do the same for all other objects

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  • We also need to do the same for the fields which are getting used on the reports

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Continue reading “Build your First Report in Microsoft Power BI Designer Part 2, Make it More User Friendly” →