PowerBI Desktop application allows you to import data from many sources: file, database, BI solution, “Big“ (unstructured) data, Microsoft “cloud” (Azure), the web page … Given the fact that there is no good report without quality data I think it is appropriate to devote one recipe especially to this problem. Below, I’ll show you how, with the help PowerBI Desktop you can import, purge and combine various data.
In one of the earlier posts I wrote about that PowerBI comes in many “flavors”: as a Cloud Service (PowerBI.com) as a development environment (PowerBI Desktop), as application for mobile devices available on Windows, Android and iOS platforms (PowerBI Mobile). Since the majority of you who are reading these lines deal with reports development I decided to demonstrate you, in a practical example, how to use PowerBI Desktop.
We use Data model, in which we add and connect several tables, to create reporting dataset. In one of previous recipes we were talking about creating links between tables by dragging & dropping keys. The subject of this post will be manual modifying, changing properties or removing data connection. Also you’ll be able to see properties of tables imported from other data sources, such as MS SQL, MS Access etc.
In one of previous recipes I described how to make an Excel database connection. Similarly you can create a connection between Data model and various data sources. Main difference is in fact that Data model uses technologies for compressing data, during their import, and decompressing them only when used in the report, which saves memory and allows you to work with large amounts of data. You can create a link to a single table, multiple tables or to a data set made by running SQL queries.