Book Image

Extending Power BI with Python and R

By : Luca Zavarella
Book Image

Extending Power BI with Python and R

By: Luca Zavarella

Overview of this book

Python and R allow you to extend Power BI capabilities to simplify ingestion and transformation activities, enhance dashboards, and highlight insights. With this book, you'll be able to make your artifacts far more interesting and rich in insights using analytical languages. You'll start by learning how to configure your Power BI environment to use your Python and R scripts. The book then explores data ingestion and data transformation extensions, and advances to focus on data augmentation and data visualization. You'll understand how to import data from external sources and transform them using complex algorithms. The book helps you implement personal data de-identification methods such as pseudonymization, anonymization, and masking in Power BI. You'll be able to call external APIs to enrich your data much more quickly using Python programming and R programming. Later, you'll learn advanced Python and R techniques to perform in-depth analysis and extract valuable information using statistics and machine learning. You'll also understand the main statistical features of datasets by plotting multiple visual graphs in the process of creating a machine learning model. By the end of this book, you’ll be able to enrich your Power BI data models and visualizations using complex algorithms in Python and R.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
1
Section 1: Best Practices for Using R and Python in Power BI
5
Section 2: Data Ingestion and Transformation with R and Python in Power BI
11
Section 3: Data Enrichment with R and Python in Power BI
17
Section 3: Data Visualization with R in Power BI

What a web service is

In the course of your work as an analyst, you may need to retrieve data through an API, exposed by a system within your network, for example. However, this is a rare case, since today almost all external data sources are exposed as web services, even within a company.

Web services are the most common and popular way of communicating information between heterogeneous information systems. A web service is basically a software module hosted on a server that is available over the internet to provide data to specific requests from a client.

There are mostly two types of design models for web services: Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) and REpresentational State Transfer (REST):

  • SOAP relies heavily on XML and defines a highly typed messaging structure through schemas. All messages exchanged between the service and the client are all encoded through Web Service Definition Language (WSDL), which, in turn, is based on the XML format. One of the most important...