Power BI, Power BI Desktop, Power BI Web App, Power Query

Power BI and Active Directory for System Administrators

Active Directory and Power BI

One of the most interesting things about Power BI is that it covers a wide range of areas. Therefore, it can help a wide range of different users to analyse and understand their businesses easily. For instance system administrators can use Power BI to analyse their Microsoft Windows Active Directory. As a matter of fact, Power BI and Active Directory can work together very nicely so that a system administrator can create high level reports and dashboards.

In this , we’ll create a report of the following charts:

Total number of computers by Operating System/Service Pack
Total number of computers by year and Operating System
Total number of computers
Print pages per minute by printer
Total number of printers by year and driver name

As a system administrator you can create heaps of other useful reports.

Get Data

On Power BI Desktop click “Get Data” then click “More”

Click “Other”, click “Active Directory” then click “Connect”

Enter a Domain name then click OK

As you can see there are 374 tables you can select to create heaps of reports. In this post I use “Computer” and “PrintQueue”

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On-premises Data Gateway Personal Mode, Power BI, Power BI Desktop, Power BI Web App

MySQL and Power BI, How Does It Work?

Update 1: At the time of writing this blog post (Aug 2015) Power BI Service called Power BI Web. I hope it doesn’t make any confusions.

Update 2: MySQL data source is available in “On-premises Data Gateway – Enterprise Mode” as well. So if you are setting this up for an organisation, then “Personal Mode” (AKA Power BI Personal Gateway) would not be suitable. When I wrote this blog post only “Power BI Personal Gateway” was available.

In this post I explain how to use MySQL and Power BI. This post covers the following areas:

Get data from MySQL
Schedule refresh on-premises MySQL from power BI web app

First of all I’d like to mention that in this post I use AdventureWorksDW which is imported into MySQL. If you want to do so you can use “Migration Wizard” from “Database” menu on MySQL Workbench.

I’m not going to explain the migration process as it’s out of scope.

How MySQL and Power BI work together

MySQL is one of the world’s most popular relational database management systems (RDBMS) widely used by the industry. It’s open source, works with many different system platforms including Microsoft Windows and Linux. So it is worth to have a look at it and see how it works with Power BI.

Luckily Microsoft provided the built-in connector in Power BI Desktop. This is how it works all together:

I’d like to say that it’s not necessary to create reports in Power BI Desktop. You can get data from a MySQL database then publish it to the Power BI cloud then setup a schedule data refresh in the Power BI web app. Then you can create your reports and dashboards on the cloud and share them with your colleagues very easily.

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Power BI, Power BI Desktop, Power BI Web App, Power Query

Data Visualisation with Power BI Desktop

As most of you guys know Power BI Desktop is released. I should say, it’s awesome. There are heaps of changes in compare with its preview edition Power BI Designer. I’ve written a series of posts regarding creating a report and dashboard using Power BI Designer before. You can find them here. Now I want to explain the same thing in Power BI Desktop. I’ll cover lots of new features in this post and I hope you enjoy it.

Get Data

Open Power BI Desktop
Click on Get Data. You can also get data from recent data sources or even open a predefined report stored in pbix format

We use Adventure Works DW 2012 database as sample, you can open your real world data source
Click on “SQL Server Database” then “Connect”
In this sample we are connecting to a “SQL Server Database”
Click “Connect”

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Power BI, Power BI Web App

Power BI 2.0 is Almost Here

As you might already know Microsoft announced Power BI 2.0 General Availability, Power BI 2.0 GA, on July 24. In this post I explain some new features that are ready to use now. Now I can say Power BI is significantly improved during the preview period. We are able to refresh on-prem datasets, we can modify the look and feel of the reports, we can share resources and much more now. For instance go to Power BI website and the first thing you can see is the Power BI logo is changed from Power BI Preview to Power BI.