POWER BI ARCHITECTURE

Data has always been an important component of how businesses operate. It helps organizations target new markets, helps in decision-making, and leads to new developments. However, in today’s fast-paced digital world, the sheer volume of data that businesses must manage can be intimidating.

What if you could put that information in a simple analytics system and utilize it to generate reports, bespoke dashboards, and interactive visualizations?

That is precisely what Microsoft Power BI offers its users.

What is Power BI?

Power BI is a business intelligence solution from Microsoft that includes apps, connectors, and software services. While MS Power BI can be used in a variety of ways, it is most typically utilized as a data visualization tool, with customizable dashboards, interactive insights, and visually immersive data dissemination all in one place.

Perks of Using Power BI for your Business

Here are a few reasons why you should consider switching to Power BI for your business:

• Seamless Integration: You can quickly implement analytics and reporting capabilities with Power BI since it connects seamlessly with your current business environment.
• Rich Personalized Dashboards: The information dashboard can be tailored to a company’s specific requirements. Dashboards and BI reports can be simply included in the application to create a consistent user experience.
• No Memory or Speed Constraints: There are no memory or speed limits when migrating an existing BI system to a strong cloud environment with Power BI incorporated, ensuring that data can be fetched and analyzed fast.
• Powered by AI: Machine learning technologies included into the software can analyze data and assist users in spotting important trends and making educated forecasts and predictions.
• Advanced Analytics: With content packs that compile all of your work into one piece, Power BI makes it simple to share what you’ve created with your team. Models are finished off with paginated reports, which allow users to make changes and improvements to their work.
• No Tech Support Required: Without the requirement for professional technical help, Power BI allows for quick inquiry and analysis. It includes a sophisticated natural language interface as well as easy-to-use graphical design tools.
• Can be Accessed Anywhere: An engineer on the go can use their phone to access data, an analyst can use their desktop computer to examine the dashboard, and a manager can use their tablet to view graphical representations during a management meeting. By allowing teams to work on any file at the same time, the BI platform makes it easier for them to collaborate.
• Affordable: Power Bi is a relatively low-cost solution for small enterprises. You can either download the free version or upgrade to the Premium version for $9.99 USD each month.

Power BI Components

Let’s take a closer look at the Power BI Architecture components, as they play an important role in delivering Power BI capabilities.

1. Power BI Desktop: Power BI Desktop is a client-side tool that serves as a development and authoring companion.

This desktop software includes tools and functionalities for connecting to data sources, transforming data, modelling data, and creating reports.

Power BI Desktop is available for free download and installation on your system. Data cleansing, creating business metrics and data models, defining the relationship between data, defining hierarchies, creating visuals, and publishing reports are all possible with Power BI Desktop features.

• Power BI Service: Power BI Service is a web-based platform that allows you to share Power BI Desktop reports, communicate with other users, and create dashboards.

It comes in three different versions: FREE, PRO, and PREMIUM.

“Power BI.com,” “Power BI Workspace,” “Power BI Site,” and “Power BI Web Portal” are all names for the Power BI Service. Advanced capabilities such as natural language Q&A and notifications are also available in this component.

• Power BI Report Server: The Power BI Report Server and the Power BI Service are comparable. Power BI Report Server is an on-premise platform, which is the only difference between the two. It’s utilized by companies that don’t want to publish their reports on the cloud and are concerned about data protection.

You may use Power BI Report Server to generate dashboards and share information with other users while adhering to strict security requirements. But you must have a Power BI Premium license to access this service.

• Power BI Gateway: This component is used in secure networks to connect to and access on-premise data. Power BI Gateways are commonly employed in businesses where data is kept secure and under constant surveillance.

Gateways facilitate the transfer of such data to Power BI solutions for analysis and reporting via secure channels.

• Power BI Mobile Apps: Power BI mobile apps allow you to stay connected to your data from anywhere.

Apps for Power BI are now available for Windows, iOS, and Android.

• Power BI Embedded: In Azure, Power BI Embedded is an on-premises service.

APIs are available for integrating reports and dashboards into custom applications.

• Power BI Query: Power Query is a data connectivity feature that allows business users to get data from numerous data sources and redesign it to meet their own needs.

Third-party users can develop their own data connectors using Power Query’s custom connectors SDK.

• Power BI Maps: Power BI Maps is used to show how the proportions of the values vary across the region.

It also demonstrates variances in shading from dark to light. It offers a 3D geographic Data Visualization Tool as well.

. Power Pivot: Power Pivot is a memory-based element that enables for extremely compressed data storage and lightning-fast aggregation and calculation. It is also available as part of Excel and may be used to create a data model within an Excel worksheet.

Power Pivot can load data on its own, or it can be fed data by Power Query. It’s very similar to the tabular model of SSAS (SQL Server Analysis Services), which is a server-based version of Power Pivot.

Now that we’ve learned about the separate components of Power BI, let’s look at how they all function together.

Power BI Architecture

The MS Power BI architecture is divided into four phases that illustrate the entire process, from data gathering to report and dashboard production. Various technologies and procedures work together to get extremely precise outcomes. Now let’s take a closer look at those steps.

1. Data Sourcing

Power BI is capable of delivering data from a wide range of internet resources and file kinds. The data can be imported into Power BI or a live service connection can be installed to receive the data. When you import a Power BI file, the compressed data sets are limited to 1 GB. It is possible to use a direct query if the data collection exceeds 1 GB. For large data sets, there are two other choices:

• Premium version of Power BI
• Analytics services provided by Azure

            Some commonly used data sources in Power BI are:

• Excel
• Text/CSV
• XML
• JSON
• Oracle Database
• IBM DB2 Database
• MySQL Database
• PostgreSQL Database
• Sybase Database
• Teradata Database
• SAP HANA Database
• SAP Business Warehouse server
• Amazon Redshift
• Impala
• Google BigQuery (Beta)
• Azure SQL Database
• Salesforce Reports
• Google Analytics
• Facebook
• GitHub

• Data Transformation

The integrated data is not yet ready to be shown because it must be transformed. The data should be cleansed or pre-processed before being transformed. Duplicate or missing values, for example, are deleted from data sets. Business rules are then used to transform data once it has been pre-processed or cleansed. The data is placed into the data warehouse after it has been processed.

• Report and Publish

Reports will be prepared based on the requirements after the data has been cleaned and transformed. A report is a visual representation of data that includes various filters and constraints and is displayed as graphs, pie charts, and other figures. To build reports, Power BI provides a number of custom visualization options. You can publish reports to Power BI services as well as an on-premise Power BI server after they’ve been created.

• Creating Dashboards

After publishing reports to Power BI services, you can now create dashboards by holding the individual elements. The use of a dashboard and a report allows for a more intuitive representation of data. Based on the insights, this visual report assists business end users in making business decisions.

How does Power BI Architecture Work?

We’ll look at how the various components of the Power BI architecture operate together in this article.

To begin, we must look at the data source that feeds into the Power BI components. These data come from a variety of places, including files, on-cloud, on-premise databases, and direct connections.

On-Premise

Users can import data from many data sources using Power BI Desktop, which is a development, authoring, and publishing tool. It allows them to build and publish reports on a Power BI Service or Report Server. These reports are visualized to aid in decision-making.

On-Cloud

The Power BI Gateway is a critical component of the Power BI Architecture, providing a safe and secure mechanism to move data or information from on-premise to cloud data sources. Furthermore, Power BI’s Cloud architecture incorporates a number of components. Datasets, dashboards, reports, Power BI Embedded, and Premium are just a few examples. Furthermore, these on-cloud data sources are linked to a variety of Power BI applications.

Power BI Service

From the client platforms, the user can generate and view numerous reports and dashboards thanks to the Power BI service architecture. To retrieve data on Power BI, the user must make a request or connect with the Power BI service.

There are two key clusters in the Power BI implementation: Front-End Cluster and Back-End Cluster.

• The first connection between the back end cluster and the clients is managed by the Front End cluster. Client authentication is handled by AAD (Azure Active Directory). It also includes a number of tokens for connecting clients to the Power BI service. In addition, Power BI makes use of the Azure Content Delivery Network (CDN) to efficiently disseminate content. Additionally, it makes use of ATM (Azure Traffic Manager) to deliver material to users based on their geographic location.
• Under Power BI, the Back End Cluster is useful for maintaining numerous reports, storage, data sets, and other services. The client has only two ways to engage directly with the information or data in the BEC. The Gateway Role and Azure API Management are the two. Furthermore, these components can be used for a variety of services such as load balancing, authentication, and routing, among others.

Conclusion

In this blog, we went over the Power BI Architecture, its processes, and components in great depth. We’ve also covered the Power BI service and how it works. You may have a better understanding of the necessity for Power BI in business intelligence, what Power BI is, and the numerous Power BI functionalities after reading this blog. You’ve also been introduced to the Power BI service, the Power BI dashboard, and the architecture.