The BI term refers to Business Intelligence. It’s a data-driven decision support system (DSS), which helps you to analyze the data and provide actionable information. It helps the business manager, corporate executives, and other users in making their decisions easily.
Business intelligence refers to the applications, technologies, and practices for the collection, analysis, integration, and presents the business information. The purpose of business intelligence is to support better decision making.
Sometimes the business intelligence is employed interchangeably with briefing books, reports, query tools, and executive information systems.
The below image shows the benefits of business intelligence, such as:

Importance of BI

Business intelligence is employed to improve all parts of a company by improving access to the firm’s data and then employing that data to increase profitability. Companies that practices BI can translate their collected data into insights their business processors.
Then the insights can be employed to create strategic business decisions that improve productivity and accelerate the growth.
Some more potential benefits of business intelligence tools include:
• Driving new revenues.
• It increases operational efficiency.
• It optimizes internal business processes.
• It improves decision making.
• It’s gaining a competitive advantage over business rivals.
• It’s employed in spotting business problems that need to be addressed.
• It can be employed in assisting companies within the identification of market trends.

Types of BI Tools

BI combines a broad set of data analysis applications that includes:
• Mobile BI
• Real-time BI
• Operational BI
• Open-source BI (OSBI)
• Collaborative BI
• Location intelligence (LI)
• Software-as-a-service BI (SaaS BI)
• Online analytical processing (OLAP)
• Ad hoc analytics

What is Power BI?

Power BI is a Data Visualization, and Business Intelligence tool which helps to convert data from different data sources into interactive dashboards and BI reports. It provides interactive visualizations with self-service business intelligence capabilities where end users can create reports and dashboards by themselves, without having to depend on information technology staff or database administrators.
Power BI provides multiple connectors, software, and services. These services based on the SaaS and mobile Power BI apps which are available for different platforms. These set of services are employed by business users to consume data and to build BI reports.

Power BI desktop app is employed to create reports, while Power BI Service (Software as a Service – SaaS) is employed to publish those reports. And Power BI mobile app is employed to view the reports and dashboards.
Different Power BI version like Desktop, Service-based (SaaS), and mobile Power BI apps are employed in different platforms.

Why Power BI

Here are some significant reasons to use the Power BI tool:
• It allows real-time dashboard updates.
• It provides secure and reliable connections to the data sources within the cloud.
• It allows data exploration employing a natural language query.
• Power BI provides a hybrid configuration, quick deployment, and secure environment.
• It provides features for dashboard visualization regularly updated with the community.
• It provides pre-built dashboards and reports for SaaS solutions.

Power BI History

• Power BI was thought by Ruler and Dhers Netz of the SQL server coverage services team at Microsoft.
• Power BI was designed by the West Chadic George in 2010 and named as a Project Crescent. In 2011, it was tied up with SQL server codenamed Mount McKinley.
• In September 2014, Microsoft revealed the first preview to Power BI.
• The first version of Power BI is released on 24 July 2015. It was based on Excel-based Add-ins such as Pivot, view, Power Query, and Map.

Power BI Components

The components of Power BI are shown as below:

Page 4 Image 3 4 — Components of Power BI

1. Power Query: It’s employed to access, search, and transform public and internal data sources.
2. Power Pivot: Power pivot is employed in data modeling for in-memory analytics.
3. Power View: By employing the power view, you’ll analyze, visualize, and display the data as an interactive data visualization.
4. Power Map: It brings the data to life with interactive geographical visualization.
5. Power BI Service: You’ll share workbooks and data views which are restored from on-premises and cloud-based data sources.
6. Power BI Q&A: You’ll ask any questions and get an immediate response with the natural language query.
7. Data Management Gateway: You get periodic data refreshers, expose tables, and view data feeds.
8. Data Catalog: By employing the data catalog, you’ll quickly discover and reuse the queries.

Power BI Architecture

The architecture of Power BI is shown as below:

Page 5 Image 4 2 — Architecture of Power BI

Power BI architecture has three phases. The first two phases use ETL (extract, transform, and load) process to handle the data.
1. Data Integration: An organization needs to deal with the data that comes from different sources.
First, extract the data from different sources which can be your separate database, servers, etc.
Then the data is integrated into a standard format and stored at a common area that’s called staging area.
2. Data Processing: Still, the integrated data is not ready for visualization because the data needs processing before it can be presented. This data is pre-processed.
For example, the missing values or redundant values will be removed from the data sets.
After that, the business rules will be applied to the data, and it transforms into presentable data.
Then this data will be loaded into the data warehouse.
3. Data presentation: Once the data is loaded and processed, then it can be visualized much better with the use of various visualization that Power BI offers.
By employing of dashboard and reports, we represent the data more intuitively.
These visual reports help business end-users to take business decision supported the insights.

Power BI Tools

Here are some essential tools of Power BI, as shown below:

• Power BI Desktop: It’s a primary authoring and publishing tool. Power BI users and developers use it to create brand new models and reports.
Power BI Desktop tool is available at free of cost.
• Power BI Service: The Power BI data modules, dashboards, and reports are hosted within the online software as a service (SaaS). Sharing, administration, and collaboration happen within the cloud.
Power BI Service tool is available at the pro license, and the user has to pay $10 per month.
• Power BI Data Gateway: It works as the bridge between the Power BI service on-premises data sources such as Import, Direct Query, and Live Query. BI Admin installs Power BI.
• Power BI Report Server: It hosts paging reports, mobile reports, KPIs, and Power BI desktop reports. It requires updates in every four months and managed by the IT team.
• Power BI Mobile Apps: It’s available for Android, iOS, and Windows. Microsoft Intune manages it by employing this tool. You’ll view reports and dashboards on the Power BI Service Report Server.

Power BI Advantages

Here are some advantages of Power BI, as shown below:

Page 7 Image 6 1 — Advantages of Power BI

1. Secure Report Publishing: You’ll automate setup data refresh and publish reports that allowing all the users to avail the latest information.
2. No Memory and Speed Constraints: To Shift an existing BI system into a powerful cloud environment with Power BI embedded eliminates memory. Speed constraints ensure that data is quickly retrievable and analyzed.
3. No Specialized Technical Support required: The Power BI provides quick inquiry and analysis without the need for specialized technical support. It also supports a powerful natural language interface and the use of intuitive graphical designer tools.
4. Simple to Use: Power BI is simple to use. Users can easily find it only on behalf of a short learning curve.
5. Constant innovation: The Power BI product is updated in every month with new functions and features.
6. Rich, personalized dashboard: The crowning feature of Power BI is the information dashboards that can be customized to meet the exact need of any enterprise. You’ll easily embed the dashboards, and BI reports within the applications to provide a unified user experience.

Power BI Disadvantages

Here are some disadvantages of Power BI, as shown below:
1. Dashboards and reports are only shared with the users who are having the equivalent email domains.
2. Power BI won’t merge imported data that’s accessed from real-time connections.
3. Power BI only accepts the file size maximum 250 Mb and the zip file which is compressed by the data of the x-velocity in-memory database.
4. Dashboard never accepts or pass user, account, or any other entity parameters.
5. Very few data sources permit real-time connections to Power BI reports and dashboards.
So, this brings us to the end of blog. This Tecklearn ‘Overview of Business Intelligence(BI) and Power BI’ blog helps you with commonly asked questions if you are looking out for a job in Power BI. If you wish to learn Power BI and build a career in Business Intelligence domain, then check out our interactive, Microsoft Power BI Training, that comes with 24*7 support to guide you throughout your learning period. Please find the link for course details:

Microsoft Power BI Training

Microsoft Power BI Training

About the Course

Microsoft Power BI Training at Tecklearn will help you achieve expertise in business analytics Our best online training course teaches you all important concepts like Power BI Desktop, Mobile, Power Query & Power Pivot, Data modelling, visualization, creating dashboards and reports, DAX, etc. As part of this program, you will work on real-world projects. Also, our Power BI course curriculum will equip you with all the key skills that are required to clear the Microsoft Power BI Certification exam (70-778).

Why Should you take Microsoft Power BI Training?

• The average annual pay for a Power BI Professional is $114,000 . -PayScale.com.
• Cognizant, Dell, KPMG, Hitachi, Wipro, Avanade, Annik Inc, Brillio and 45,000 MNCs across 185 countries use Power BI and it has a market share of around 7% globally.
• Microsoft Power BI has been ranked at No.1 position in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms for 13 consecutive years.

What you will Learn in this Course?

Introduction to Microsoft Power BI

• Microsoft Power BI Introduction
• Power BI Products
• Power BI Architecture
• Installing Power BI
• Connecting to Data Sources

Power BI Workflow

• Key features of Power BI workflow
• Power BI Vs MSBI
• History of Power BI
• Power BI Products
• Data modelling and relationships

Power Query for Data Transformation

• Power Query for Data Transformation
• Learning about Power Query for self-service ETL functionalities
• Working with Excel data
• Introduction to Query Editor
• Data transformation
• Pivot and UnPivot
• Merge Join, relational operators, date, time calculations, working with M functions
• Summary Tables
• Writing custom functions and error handling
• M advanced data transformations

Filters and Drill Down Report

• Visualization Filter
• Page Level Filter
• Report LEVEL Filter
• DRILL Through Filter or Report
• BookMark Report

Power Pivot for Data Modelling

• What is SSAS
• Data Modelling
• Star Schema
• Snowflake Schema
• Introduction to MDDB and Tabular
• Data Access Modes
• Tabular with DAX
• Power BI with DAX
• DAX Functions

Data Analysis Expression – DAX Queries

• TABULAR with DAX
• Power BI with DAX
• Calculated Members, Row, Filter & Evaluation Context
• Cumulative Charts
• Calculated Tables, ranking and rank over groups
• DAX advanced features

Power BI Desktop & Administration

• Reports and Visualization
• Learning about data modelling and data relationships
• Deploying data gateways
• Reports and Dashboards
• On Premises Data Gateway
• Gateway Clusters

Introduction to Power Q & A

• Power Service
• Power Q & A best practices
• Integrating with SaaS applications
• Gateway

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