Book Image

Microsoft Power BI Data Analyst Certification Guide

By : Orrin Edenfield, Edward Corcoran
5 (1)
Book Image

Microsoft Power BI Data Analyst Certification Guide

5 (1)
By: Orrin Edenfield, Edward Corcoran

Overview of this book

Microsoft Power BI enables organizations to create a data-driven culture with business intelligence for all. This guide to achieving the Microsoft Power BI Data Analyst Associate certification will help you take control of your organization's data and pass the exam with confidence. From getting started with Power BI to connecting to data sources, including files, databases, cloud services, and SaaS providers, to using Power BI’s built-in tools to build data models and produce visualizations, this book will walk you through everything from setup to preparing for the certification exam. Throughout the chapters, you'll get detailed explanations and learn how to analyze your data, prepare it for consumption by business users, and maintain an enterprise environment in a secure and efficient way. By the end of this book, you'll be able to create and maintain robust reports and dashboards, enabling you to manage a data-driven enterprise, and be ready to take the PL-300 exam with confidence.
Table of Contents (25 chapters)
1
Part 1 – Preparing the Data
6
Part 2 – Modeling the Data
11
Part 3 – Visualizing the Data
15
Part 4 – Analyzing the Data
18
Part 5 – Deploying and Maintaining Deliverables
21
Part 6 – Practice Exams

Connecting to data sources

You may want to include data from a variety of different sources, each of which has its own methods of connecting. We'll look at a couple of types of data sources in this section.

On-premises data gateway

Since Power BI lives as both a desktop tool and an online SaaS that provides the hosting of reports and dashboards, it is important to connect to non-online-hosted data sources as well. This is accomplished with the on-premises data gateway (referred to as the data gateway). The data gateway is a free download from the Microsoft Download Center that works with the online Power BI service to enable this connectivity on local resources from the cloud.

It is important to understand how the on-premises data gateway is different from other gateway software that may have been used in the past. The data gateway software runs on a local Windows computer, and it needs to have an internet connection to connect to an intermediary Azure Service Bus. This...