If writing SQL queries is in your job description I am certain that you, in great extent, inside SELECT command, use a GROUP BY clause that allows you to group row values by a given column and then apply an aggregation function, e.g. SUM, COUNT, AVERAGE, MIN, MAX… I have good news for you: we can achieve almost the same thing within an Excel report by using the GROUPBY function…
Microsoft Fabric represents an end-to-end analytical solution that combines Power BI, as a reporting platform, Data Factory, as a data integration service, as well as Microsoft Synapse Data Engineering, Data Warehousing, Data Science and Real Time Analytics. It is designed as a software as a service solution, and the data is stored within the OneLake repository, which enables the storage of structured and unstructured data…
Power BI is, for the most part, used for business reporting purposes, and the ultimate goal is to publish company data in the cloud, along with related reports, and then create reporting dashboards that provide the information necessary to support decision making. A free Power BI subscription can also be used for this, but I still recommend that you use (purchase) a Power BI Professional license. Why? More about this in the text that follows …
In several previous “recipes” I wrote about how to connect to Microsoft SQL Server from Excel in order to retrieve data to a worksheet. These were all “innocent” operations, since you could only read the data from the database, not to change them. Sometimes it is necessary to create a program that performs more complex manipulation over the database by running appropriate SQL query, which will be discussed in the text that follows.
Power Query is indeed powerful Excel add-in that allows retreiving data from different locations, changing them and preparing for further processing. Data sets are retrieved by creating queries to the data source, and the result of each query is stored in a separate table. Sometimes it is necessary to merge the results of two queries. The following text will explain how this works.