We have brought the best of these articles together to form The SysAdmin Handbook. With over fifty articles packed into this book, it will be an essential refere Microsoft SharePoint hybrid consists of a growing list of advanced hybrid solutions that empowers organizations to consume benefits of the cloud and maintain their on-premises investments. This book is the second in a series of SharePoint hybrid books in which we show you how to configure, troubleshoot, and manage a SharePoint hybrid environment.
Introducing Windows Server Windows Server has powered a generation of organizations, from small businesses to large enterprises. No matter what your role in IT, you can be guaranteed you that have touched Windows Server at some point in your career or at very least you have seen it from afar!
This book introduces you to Windows Server , which is the next version of Windo Contemporary Bioethics. Such KPIs generally require that the data be aggregated, calculations performed on it, or both. These aggregations and calculations are called metrics or measures and are used to identify trends or patterns that can inform business decision-making. In some cases, advanced analysis tools such as programming languages, machine learning and artificial intelligence, data mining, streaming analytics, and unstructured analytics are necessary in order to gain the proper insights.
There are numerous programming languages that have either been specifically designed from the ground up for data analytics or have developed robust data analytics packages or extensions.
Two of the most popular languages in this space include R and Python. There is also a wide variety of machine learning and data mining tools and platforms for performing predictive analytics around data classification, regression, anomaly detection, clustering, and decision-making. Streaming analytics becomes important when dealing with Internet of Things IoT data. Of course, any discussion around data analytics tools would be incomplete without including Microsoft Excel.
Spreadsheets have long been the go-to analytics tool for business users, and the most popular spreadsheet today is Microsoft Excel. The final key concept in business intelligence is visualization , or the actual presentation of the analysis being performed. Humans are visually oriented and thus must be able to see the results of the analysis being performed in the form of charts, reports, and dashboards. This may take the form of tables, matrices, pie charts, bar graphs, and other visual displays that help provide context and meaning to the analysis.
In the same way that a picture is worth a thousand words , visualizations allow thousands, millions, or even trillions of individual data points to be presented in a concise manner that is easily consumed and understandable.
Visualization allows the analyst or report author to let the data tell a story. This story answers the questions that are originally posed by the business and thus delivers the insights that allow organizations to make better decisions.
These charts are designed to present a specific facet or metric of the data within a specific context. For example, one chart may display the number of visitors to a website by country while another chart may display the number of website page visits per browser.
Business intelligence tools allow multiple individual tables and charts to be combined on a single page or report. Modern business intelligence tools such as Power BI support interactivity between individual visualizations in order to further aid in the discovery and analysis process. This interactivity allows the report consumer to click on portions of individual visualizations such as bar charts, maps, and tables in order to drill down into the information that's been presented or determine the influence between that portion of a chart and the rest of the visualizations on a report.
For example, given the two charts we referenced previously, the report consumer can click on a particular country in the first report to display the page visit breakdown per browser for that particular country in the second chart. Finally, dashboards provide easy to understand visualizations of KPIs that are important to an organization. For example, the CEO of a corporation may wish to see particular information from sales, marketing, operations, and human resources.
Each of these departments might have their own detailed reports, but the CEO only wishes to track one or two of the individual visualizations within each of those reports. Dashboards enable this functionality. While Power BI is often classified as a visualization tool, the reality is that Power BI is not a single tool but rather a collection of interrelated tools and services that form a complete business intelligence ecosystem of its own.
This ecosystem spans the entire business intelligence spectrum, from data sources to modeling, analysis, and visualization. In addition, this ecosystem includes components that are specific to Power BI itself but also to other Microsoft technologies that interoperate with Power BI, as well as third-party integrations.
This interoperation with other Microsoft tools and technologies as well as third-parties makes Power BI a formidable business intelligence platform whose value far exceeds that of more siloed business intelligence tools in the market. While the Power BI ecosystem is vast and complex, this ecosystem can be broken down into the following categories:.
The Power BI Desktop is a free, Windows-based application that's installed on a local desktop or laptop computer. The Power BI Desktop is the primary tool that's used to ingest, cleanse, and transform various sources of data, combine the data into models, and then analyze and visualize the data through the creation of calculations, visualizations, and reports. Originally known as Power BI for Office , today it is often referred to as powerbi. The Power BI Service can be used for light report editing as well as sharing, collaborating, and viewing reports.
Some data sources can be connected directly from the Power BI Service, but the ability to model and analyze that data is limited. Power Query is the Microsoft technology that provides data connectivity and transformation. This technology allows business users to access over different sources and transform the data without using code.
Data sources supported by Power Query include a large number of file types, databases, Microsoft Azure services, and third-party services. Power Query also provides a software development kit SDK that allows for the creation of custom connectors so that third parties can create their own data connectors that seamlessly interoperate with Power Query. Data Analysis Expressions DAX is a programming language that consists of a collection of functions, operators, and constants that can be used to write formulas, or expressions, that return calculated values.
The on-premises data gateway is software that is installed on premises in order to facilitate access from the Power BI Service to on-premises data sources. This allows the Power BI Service to refresh data from one or more data sources housed within on-premises systems.
The on-premises data gateway comes in two modes—personal and enterprise. These visuals are supported within the Power BI Service as well but cannot be used directly from within the Service. Power BI Embedded is a system of REST APIs that can be used to display visualizations, reports, and dashboards within custom applications that serve customers that are external to an organization.
The HoloLens capabilities allow data to be projected holographically within the mixed reality environment, and also have the ability to view and interact with reports and dashboards published within the Power BI Service. Office is Microsoft's ubiquitous line of subscription services, which includes traditional Office applications plus other productivity services that are enabled via the cloud the internet.
Central to Office is the concept of a tenant , an organization's very own slice of Office Power BI integrates natively with Office so that when a user subscribes to Power BI, the email address is checked for existing Office tenants, and if one exists, the Power BI user will be added to that tenant. If an Office tenant does not exist, Power BI will provision a new Office tenant, sometimes called a shadow tenant , and the Power BI user will be added to that tenant.
Excel incorporates many underlying Power BI technologies as native add-ins. Microsoft Flow is a workflow technology that has a native connector for Power BI that supports both triggers and actions. Triggers are based on the Power BI Service's data alerts, and actions support both streaming and non-streaming datasets in the Service.
Flow is actually part of the same group of applications within Microsoft, that is, the Business Applications Group. PowerApps is a form of technology from Microsoft that provides a native connector to Power BI, as well as a custom visual.
This visual allows you to link data within Power BI to a Visio diagram as values or colors that are displayed within the Visio drawing. Dynamics provides the ability to embed Power BI visuals natively within Dynamics reports and dashboards.
In addition, Power BI has native connectors for Dynamics. The CDS allows an organization to store and manage data from all of these business applications within a set of standard and custom entities. Entities allow an organization to create a business-focused definition of their data and use this data within apps. This includes the ability to create Columns from Example within Power Query, as well as custom visualizations such as the Key Influencers visual that's available in AppSource.
This allows you to stream data that's running through Azure Streaming Analytics and display it on Power BI's dashboard tiles. Microsoft has created a number of APIs and SDKs that enable the creation of custom visuals, data source connectors, and automation.
As a result, there is a large extended ecosystem of third-party custom visuals, connectors, apps, and add-on products for Power BI. The Power BI community is a large ecosystem of users focused on the education and use of Power BI within local communities. In addition to local user groups, there is a general community website that provides forums and galleries where Power BI users can get questions answered about using Power BI.
Power BI Desktop is free to download, install, and use. In addition to simply sharing Power BI files. While this URL is long and cryptic and these reports are not indexed by search engines, anyone with the link can browse the report anonymously. This means that there is no real security other than simple obfuscation. It is important to note here that Publish to web is the only sharing mechanism available with a free license of Power BI.
All other sharing, collaboration, and export features are not available in the Power BI Service. The free licensing of Power BI also comes with certain restrictions on the automatic refreshing of data. Only online sources of data can be refreshed automatically.
This means any data that is accessible online via the internet. On-premises data sources that require an on-premises data gateway or any live DirectQuery sources are not supported. Furthermore, even the online data sources can only be refreshed eight times per day, and the minimum time between refreshes is 30 minutes. Finally, the free Power BI license restricts the total size of any single data model that's published to the Power BI Service to 1 GB and the total size of all data models that are published to the Service for each user to 10 GB.
Pro is a subscription license for authoring and consuming shared reports within the Power BI Service. Pro licensing of Power BI enables all of the sharing, collaboration, and export features that are not enabled with a free license and also allows online and on-premises data sources to be refreshed.
Finally, Pro has the same restrictions in terms of dataset size and total capacity as Power BI free licenses. This means that the total size of any single data model that's published to the Power BI Service is restricted to 1 GB and the total size of all data models that are published to the Service for each user cannot exceed 10 GB. Unlike Power BI Embedded, these capacities are purchased on a monthly—not an hourly—basis. Power BI Premium also increases a single dataset size to 10 GB and supports up to 48 refreshes per day with a minimum time between refreshes of 1 minute.
Finally, Power BI Premium unlocks enterprise features such as the ability to publish paginated reports, incremental refresh, and multi-geo support.
The same number of virtual cores that are provisioned for Power BI Premium in the cloud can also be used for Power BI Report Server, although you should check the latest documentation from Microsoft since the exact licensing model changes over time. Power BI Embedded is a capacity-based subscription license. This means that increments of capacity in the form of virtual CPU cores and memory are purchased on an hourly basis. Power BI Embedded is intended for use by developers and independent software vendors that use APIs in order to embed Power BI visuals, reports, and dashboards within their custom web applications.
These applications can then be accessed by external customers. Finally, it is worth noting that A1 and A2 nodes run on non-dedicated capacity while A3 to A6 nodes run on dedicated capacity.
This is important as dedicated capacity can avoid noisy neighbor scenarios that may impact overall performance.
Power BI Report Server is intended for customers who wish to keep their data completely on premises. However, Power BI Report Server can access and refresh online and on-premises data sources without requiring a gateway. Reza lives in Auckland, New Zealand, but you will probably see him speaking in a conference, or teaching a course near your city or country time by time. BI Developers and Consultants who want to know how to develop solutions with this technology. Business Analysts who want to have better tool for playing with the data and learn tricks of producing insights easier.
Fantastic Job… Regards , Simone. Will it be okay if I use some of the image, perhaps for my presentation? Reza, Well thought content, kudos to you! Hi Reza Many thanks for what looks like a great book — I am looking forward to getting into it. The book mentions this will be covered in future posts — do you know when they might be available, or do you know of other resources to help with this? Thanks Mark. Hi Mark, Thanks for your kind feedback. I want to create a report with one page per record ie it wil be many thousands of pages long.
Best would be using tools such as SSRS for such requirement. Cheers Reza. Reza Rad.
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