Book Image

Microsoft Power BI Cookbook

By : Author Test, Brett Powell
Book Image

Microsoft Power BI Cookbook

By: Author Test, Brett Powell

Overview of this book

Microsoft Power BI is a business intelligence and analytics platform consisting of applications and services designed to provide coherent, visual and interactive insights of data. This book will provide thorough, technical examples of using all primary Power BI tools and features as well as demonstrate high impact end-to-end solutions that leverage and integrate these technologies and services. Get familiar with Power BI development tools and services, go deep into the data connectivity and transformation, modeling, visualization and analytical capabilities of Power BI, and see Power BI’s functional programming languages of DAX and M come alive to deliver powerful solutions to address common, challenging scenarios in business intelligence. This book will excite and empower you to get more out of Power BI via detailed recipes, advanced design and development tips, and guidance on enhancing existing Power BI projects.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)

Establishing and managing connections to data sources

There are two primary components of queries in Power BI: the data source and the query logic executed against this source. The data source includes the connection method (DirectQuery or Import), its privacy setting, and the authentication credentials. The query logic consists of the M expressions represented as queries in the Query Editor and stored internally as M documents.

In a typical corporate BI tool, such as SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS), the properties of a data source such as the server and database name are defined separately from the queries that reference them. In Power BI Desktop, however, by default each individual query created explicitly references a given data source (for example, server A and database B). This creates an onerous, manual process of revising each query if necessary to change the source...