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

Geocoding addresses using Python

In this section, we'll show you how to make calls to the Bing Maps Locations API using both a direct call to the URL via the GET method (which is ultimately equivalent to the example call you made earlier via the browser) and a dedicated Python Software Development Kit (SDK) that facilitates the query.

Using an explicit GET request

If we want to receive geocoding data for an address from the Bing API, we need to make a request to the web service by passing the address of interest as a parameter. The parameters are passed through appropriate concatenation of the parameters with the URL of the endpoint. In our case, the full format of the endpoint URL useful for geocoding an address is as follows:

Figure 9.3 – URL format of a GET request to the Bing Maps Locations API

The following is the definition of each string token you can see in Figure 9.3: