Tag Archives: Power BI architecture

Data Warehouse Design and Power BI at SQL Saturday Tampa 2019

SQLSaturday #859 - Tampa 2019

Hello, fellow data nerds! I wanted to make you aware of a fantastic event coming up this month in Tampa, Florida. On Saturday, March 23, 2019, the annual SQL Saturday event will be hosted at the University of South Florida! This is a really tremendous opportunity to engage in some quality training at little to no cost. If you’re able to be in the Tampa area Saturday 3/23 then you need to register for this event. I’ve seen the schedule and the line up is impressive! Old dogs and young dogs alike will learn something new from a host of professionals and industry experts!

I’ll be presenting two sessions during the morning of March 23 at SQL Saturday Tampa and I’d love to see you there!

Making Sense of the Power BI Ecosystem

Power BI has taken the world by storm since it’s release in mid-2015. Since then, Microsoft’s cloud analytics service has matured and grown in scope and complexity. In this session, we’ll seek to understand the moving parts of the Power BI ecosystem including Power BI Pro, Premium, Report Server, Embedded, Data Flows, and more. By the end of this session the audience should have a firm grasp on the components ecosystem and how those components work together.

Building a Data Warehouse from the Ground Up

What if you could approach any business process in your organization and quickly design an effective and optimal dimensional model using a standardized step-by-step method? In this session we’ll discuss the steps required to design a unified dimensional model that is optimized for reporting and follows widely accepted best practices. We’ll also discuss how the design of our dimensional model affects a semantic modeling technologies like SQL Server Analysis Services or Power BI and how the choices we make during the data warehouse design phase can make or break our reports.

I hope you can make it to this really amazing event and can make it to one of my sessions! Don’t forget to register! If you do, swing by and say hi to me!

Power BI Architecture Diagram v4 is now available!

I’ve finally updated my Power BI Architecture Diagram to include some of the new features that are now available and will soon be available. There are three new updates I made to the diagram in v4.

Download the Power BI Architecture Diagram v4

Download the Power BI Architecture Diagram Legend

First and most importantly, I updated the Power BI logo in the diagram to the latest version of the logo!

power bi icon

Secondly, I included Power BI Dataflows in the diagram tagged #6. Power BI Dataflows are used to ingest, transform, integrate, and enrich big data by defining data source connections, ETL logic, refresh schedules, and more. Data is stored as entities in the Common Data Model in Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2. Dataflow entities can be consumed as a data source in Power BI and by using Power BI Desktop. Read more about Dataflows here.

Lastly, I also included item #14 to illustrate the upcoming capability Power BI users will have to directly access Power BI hosted data models via XMLA. This will allow you to connect to the Analysis Services data models using Tableau, Qlik, SSRS, SSMS, Dax Studio, SQL Server Profiler and other tools. Initially only read-access will be supported. Eventually write-access will be supported, meaning that I’ll be able to refresh Power BI data models using other client tools. This capability is not currently available at the time of me writing this blog post, but stay tuned.

And don’t forget to download the updated legend that goes with the Power BI Architecture Diagram used to describe and explain the components.

Thoughts and feedback?

Take a look at the diagram and let me know your thoughts and any feedback you have! And if you found it useful, leave a comment and let me know and share it with your colleagues!

Download the Power BI Architecture Diagram

Download the latest version of the Power BI Architecture Diagram here!

As a Data Platform Solution Architect for Microsoft, one of my jobs is to help teach my customers what our amazing tools can do and how those tools work. Interest in Power BI is blowing up and I’m seeing most of my customers express huge interest in this awesome tool. To help facilitate the conversation about how Power BI works and how it can help my customers, I put together this diagram.

Also, each text block in the black area to the right includes a link to the documentation on PowerBI.com for the specific component. So if I’m looking at the diagram and I want to gather more information on the Power BI Gateway – Enterprise, just click the text block or point #2. Continue reading Download the Power BI Architecture Diagram