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Power BI for all Data-challenges

In this blog, we will discuss the data challenges addressed by Power BI. In today’s world, almost every data-driven organization majorly depends on its data to convert random information into powerful insights. With the world’s daily data generation rate of 5 exabytes of data/day, it has become a powerful asset for any organization. On average, about 30-40% overall growth is observed by data-driven organizations through data insights.

From Apple to Facebook to Google, everyone relies on a data-driven approach to ace up their business through effective decision-making using Data Analytics. According to a source, Facebook generated about 4 petabytes of data/ day in 2020. These numbers are highly intimidating! Aren’t they?

Data is increasing rapidly and it has become extremely important to manage it effectively.

Why use Power BI for your Important Data?

Power BI is known for its seamless and cost-effective Business Intelligence. From extracting the data through multiple sources to cleaning the data, modeling it, effective visualizations, and interactive reporting, Power BI is a complete package.

With Power BI, data integration has become very easy. You are able to extract data from multiple sources such as Excel, SAP, APIs, Cloud, Azure, etc. Power BI lets you unify this data. It also allows you to unify data from two same databases. Within a few clicks, the whole process is sorted. Now, we know it sounds so easy but it isn’t.

First, let’s understand an outline of the data integration and extraction :

  • The amalgamation of data from multiple formats to coherent data format.
  • Power BI data flows are known to help a user to connect with a variety of data from multiple sources within minutes.
  • The data management gateway helps in organizing, sorting, storing, and handling data in an enterprise’s database.

How does Power BI handle Data Integration & Reporting challenges?

Data is an in-exhausting resource that is continuously being used to monitor the overall health of any organization. When this data is integrated and analyzed in Power BI, there are a lot of challenges faced by the team of analysts. These challenges involve:

  • Multiple sources of Data
  • Cleaning and sorting of Data
    1. Removal of irrelevant Data
    2. Modeling of inconsistent Data
  • Drawing Data insights
  • Real-time conclusions

Let’s understand these in detail:

Multiple sources of Data:

Every large organization usually has huge volumes of data. Eventually, managing that much data is always a task. Whereas, to take out useful conclusions from that data is even tougher. But, when you’re dealing with data from multiple sources, it becomes a very daunting task.

Moreover, the data from multiple sources is already very disoriented. As a result of it, the siloed data is difficult to identify and merge. To derive insights from it becomes a bigger task.

All of these issues are addressed by Power BI. In this, data is integrated within a single chart, which allows you to use the data from multiple sources. Microsoft has listed multiple sources from which you can extract the data into Power BI such as SAP, Excel, SQL, XML, APIs, XML, Text, Azure, cloud, etc.

Cleaning and sorting of Data:

When we extract the data from multiple sources, the biggest problem is the unclean data. There are missing values, repeating numbers, duplicity, incorrect column names, etc., All of these problems are addressed during the data cleaning process.

Sorting of Irrelevant Data

Generally, there is a three-step approach that is followed by data analysts after data extraction:

Cleaning >> Transforming >> Modeling

Power Query is a Power BI feature that helps clean the data. Using it, you can easily simplify complex information. From cleaning and filtering values, changing data types, to renaming the columns, Pivot data, etc. all are done using Power Query.

Modeling the Inconsistent Data:

Power BI lets you connect the data structures. It helps to create reports from different tables containing different fields. Power BI helps to create relationships between different tables for proper data modeling. Thus, data modeling has become so easy with it.

Drawing Data Insights

Eventually, the data after being formatted and modeled becomes ready to be used for drawing insights. Power BI allows you to gain meaningful insights from the data after analyzing it. Data analysis eventually helps in calculating the risks and benefits of your business.

The biggest challenge is to overcome the inability to integrate Machine Learning. With Power BI, you can create machine learning-based models which help to analyze the outcomes. It helps the models to make relevant predictions on this behalf.

E.g., If we have some problem, that has two possible outcomes, Power BI will suggest you a binary prediction so that the outcome is achieved.

Real-time conclusions

One of the most hectic tasks is deriving the real-time and right insights for the data. Too much data is always overwhelming. Also, the backdated data is considered useless in the case of real-time evaluations. Here, obviously, we need a tool that gives us real-time conclusions. In other words, we need something that can collect, manage, analyze and alert businesses regarding ongoing market trends. As a decision-maker, you will be facilitated by this type of approach.

Power BI provides you with real-time solutions. It is automatic and refreshes itself while updating the dashboard with all the updated data through various visuals and data tables. The data set can be from PubNub, REST API, or Azure data stream. It is an Automatic page refresh for all of the pages one by one. If you turn it ON, your report will be auto-updated and self-optimized. Whereas, if you turn it OFF, it is presented as last refreshed. However, the most amazing thing is that it is done within a second.

Conclusion:

Power BI solves all your data-related challenges with ease. Power BI is a very powerful Microsoft tool that will make your Business smart with its amazing data analytics techniques. It is cheaper yet loaded with advanced features. It solves data unification challenges effectively and thus, helps in effective decision-making.

We at Eclytics deal with Power BI Consulting and Training both. Connect with us to know.

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