It’s such an honor that I’m invited to speak in Pass Business Intelligence Virtual Chapter webinar which will be held on 23 Jan 2016. I would be very happy to have you all in the webinar.
On-premises Data Gateway (aka Power BI Enterprise Gateway) is release a while ago (2 Dec. 2015), but, with the latest release on 22 Dec. 2015 Power BI Enterprise Gateway now supports live connections to both SQL Server Analysis Services Multidimensional and Tabular models as well as SAP HANA. In this post I’ll explain lots of important aspects of the Power BI Enterprise Gateway including installation, configuration for different data sources including SSAS Multidimensional, Tabular and SQL Server Database and much more. If you need to have the lowest possible latency then you need DirectQuery/Explore Live feature on top of your on-premises data sources. The good news is that Power BI Enterprise Gateway now supports all following data sources:
SQL Server Database
SQL Server Analysis Services Multidimensional
SQL Server Analysis Services Tabular
SAP HANA
In this article you’ll learn how to install and configure Power BI Enterprise Gate Way, how to manage different live data sources, how to create reports on top of live data sources and more.
Note 1: If you want to use DirectQuery to connect to your on-prem SQL Server Database OR Explore Live your SQL Server Analysis Services Tabular model then you might not need to install and use the Power BI Enterprise Gateway. In those cases you can install Power BI Personal Gateway to connect to an instance of SQL Server OR install Power BI Analysis Services Connector to connect to your on-prem instance of SQL Server Analysis Services Tabular model rather than installing the Power BI Enterprise Gateway. But, bear in mind that selecting the best gateway is really depending on your use cases, your data sources and the environment you’re working on.
Note 2: The Power BI Enterprise Gateway and Power BI Personal Gateway CAN be installed on the same machine.
Downloading and Installing Power BI Enterprise Gateway
Without a doubt cloud computing is going to change the future of data analytics and data visualisation very significantly. Microsoft Azure SQL Data Warehouse recently released for public preview. Combining Power BI as a powerful data visualisation tool with Azure SQL Data Warehouse will give the users the ability to see data insights of their data stored in Azure Data Warehouse very easily. In this post I explain how to install Azure SQL Data Warehouse and the the way it works with Power BI. Before going any further I’d like to have a look at the Azure SQL Data Warehouse very briefly.
What Is Azure SQL Data Warehouse?
Based on Microsoft documentation a SQL Data Warehouse is
Azure SQL Data Warehouse supports stored procedures, user-defined functions, indexes and collations. It uses columnstore index technology which significantly improves query performance as well as getting you up to 5 times compression in compare with traditional row based indexing.
I leave it to you learn more about Azure SQL Data Warehouse. But, it is important to keep in mind that there are some features like primary keys and foreign keys that are NOT supported in Azure SQL Data Warehouse which affect the way we use Power BI as a data visualisation tool over Azure SQL Data Warehouse. Without primary keys and foreign keys there is no physical relationships between the tables so Power BI service cannot detect any relationships by itself. There is a workaround for this that we can create some SQL views in Azure side to make it work. This can be an expensive solution. The other way is to load the data warehouse into a Power BI Desktop model which can detect the relationships automatically.
Now you know a bit bout Azure SQL Data Warehouse let’s get back to the subject and talk more about Power BI and Azure SQL Data Warehouse.
First things first. You need to have a Microsoft Azure subscription. If you don’t already have it you can use it for a one month trial here. You’ll also get $250 credit. But, remember that if you succeed the $250 in less than a month then you’ll need to pay for it if you want to use it longer.
Install Azure SQL Data Warehouse
After you get your Azure subscription, login to your account and you should see a dashboard like this
I’m not going to explain the above dashboard as it is out of scope of this article.
Click New
Click “Data + Storage” then click “SQL Data Ware House”
Microsoft is building lots of cloud based technologies these days and Microsoft Dynamics CRM is not an exception. With a powerful data visualisation tool like Power BI Microsoft took a great step to integrate Dynamics CRM and Power BI which means you can easily connect from Power BI website and Power BI Desktop to a cloud based Microsoft Dynamics CRM instance. In this article I express a step-by-step tutorial to be able to connect to connect to Dynamics CRM from Power BI website as well as Power BI Desktop.
Prerequisites:
You can only connect to Dynamics CRM Online (Cloud based Dynamics CRM) from both Power BI Desktop and Power BI website. If you have an older version on-premises Dynamics CRM and you’re willing to create visualisations on Power BI then you need to connect to the CRM database on SQL Server instance just like any other SQL Server databases.
You need to have a valid OData URL for a Dynamics CRM Online instance and an administrator must enable the OData endpoint in the CRM site settings. To find the OData endpoint address:
After browsing your CRM Online in a browser click “Customizations” from “Settings”
Click “Developer Resources”
Scroll down and then you can see OData URL under “Organization Data Service”
You should connect to Dynamics CRM Online using the same user account as your Power BI website. So if you have a different Power BI account then unfortunately you need to create a new account in Power BI which is identical to your CRM account.
