Book Image

Microsoft Power BI Quick Start Guide - Second Edition

By : Devin Knight, Erin Ostrowsky, Mitchell Pearson, Schacht
Book Image

Microsoft Power BI Quick Start Guide - Second Edition

By: Devin Knight, Erin Ostrowsky, Mitchell Pearson, Schacht

Overview of this book

This revised edition has been fully updated to reflect the latest enhancements to Power BI. It includes a new chapter dedicated to dataflow, and covers all the essential concepts such as installation, designing effective data models, as well as building basic dashboards and visualizations to help you and your organization make better business decisions. You’ll learn how to obtain data from a variety of sources and clean it using Power BI Query Editor. You’ll then find out how you can design your data model to navigate and explore relationships within it and build DAX formulas to make your data easier to work with. Visualizing your data is a key element in this book, and you’ll get to grips rapidly with data visualization styles and enhanced digital storytelling techniques. In addition, you will acquire the skills to build your own dataflows, understand the Common Data Model, and automate data flow refreshes to eradicate data cleansing inefficiency. This guide will help you understand how to administer your organization's Power BI environment so that deployment can be made seamless, data refreshes can run properly, and security can be fully implemented. By the end of this Power BI book, you’ll have a better understanding of how to get the most out of Power BI to perform effective business intelligence.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)
10
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11
Index

Scheduling data refreshes

Refreshing data in Power BI Report Server comes with a lot more caveats than using the Power BI cloud service. For example, refreshing is contingent on the data source that the report is using. Since you've installed this server inside your firewall, there's no need for a data management gateway to refresh the data either. As you create refreshing schedules, the server will simply create SQL Server Agent jobs to control the refreshes, such as Reporting Services. Because of this, SQL Server Agent must be started in order to create scheduled refreshes.

If you plan on refreshing data sources that are derived from files, make sure you use a network path for that file (\\computername\sharename\file.csv), not a local path (such as C:\Downloads\File.csv). You can do this in Power BI Desktop by going to the Home ribbon and selecting Edit Queries | Data Source Settings. Click Change Source and change any file references to a network path, such as \\MyComputer...