Data Governance with Power BI Premium

Data Governance – a hot topic on everyone’s minds. As I’m working on a BI project in the financial district in New York, it has me thinking about data governance and how it’s something we struggle with in the BI world.

I’m here to share good news about some great tools for implementing data governance built in to the Power BI and Azure ecosystem. Let me tell you about some new features in Power BI Premium that help us enforce data governance rules.

Classifications

• In my demo I show how you can classify a dashboard, which essentially allows my users to understand the trustworthiness of the data they can see through the objects accessible through that database.
• We can click on Settings under Actions and see the classification levels. The governing body within my organization will decide whether the data exposed through a dashboard has a high, medium or low business impact, as well as whether it’s certified or non-certified data.
• With this, my user knows what to expect and understands what kind of business decisions they should be able to make based on this data.

Dataflows

• Currently in preview, this important feature will be a foundational standard going forward which I can use to build standardized, centralized data models that allow me to define a single version of the truth. Very similar to how we would in a data warehouse but in much simpler terms.
• A dataflow consists of entities that are built using standard Power Query tools in the browser, so they stay within the service.
• The editor is very similar to the Query Editor within Power BI Desktop, but we do this right within the browser and we have access to most of the same capabilities and functionality that we would in Desktop.
• I can also bind an entity to standard entity mappings within the common data service. There are industry standard definitions and also ones that I can build myself and manage within my organization.
• Another important difference to mention with dataflows is that when I import this data, it resides within Azure Data Lake Gen 2 storage, allowing access to that data from other Azure services rather than just Power BI reports.

Essentially this gives me a platform where I have governed data that has been marked as trustworthy, it’s accessible to other services and Power BI Premium now becomes an orchestration platform where I can utilize many services such as Azure Data Lake, Azure Data Factory and Azure Machine Learning.

We can easily apply many advanced data science and machine learning models after a Dataflow has been defined. Another great thing to take advantage of.

With Premium, Dataflows and the common data service, we have a single governed data platform that we can use to manage important enterprise data within the Power BI Service. If you want to learn more about these incredible features or anything around data governance or Azure in general, click the link below or contact us—we’re here to help.