Pragmatic Works Nerd News

ETL with Power BI Dataflows

Written by Pragmatic Works | Jan 22, 2019

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve heard of Power BI. In case you don’t know, Power BI is a business analytics solution from Microsoft that lets you visualize your data and share insights across your organization or embed them in your app or website. You can connect to hundreds of data sources and bring your data to life with live dashboards and reports.

Here's a question: Can Power BI be an ETL tool? With a new feature of Power BI, called Dataflows, you can. In a recent webinar, Joe Abbott, teaches you about creating a re-usable data source with Dataflows.

In the modern BI world, data preparation is considered the most difficult, expensive, and time-consuming task, estimated by experts as taking 60%-80% of the time and cost of a typical analytics project. With Dataflows you can easily ingest, cleanse, transform, integrate, enrich, and schematize data.

Power BI provides analysts today with industry leading data preparation capabilities using Power Query in Power BI Desktop. Power BI Dataflows brings the Power of M (Power Query) to the Power BI Service.

This webinar will discuss the 5 reasons to use, or at least try, Power BI Dataflows:

  • Intuitive and familiar authoring
  • Power Query (Excel and Power BI users)
  • Auto Orchestration
  • Big Data ready
  • Common Data Model
  • Native integration

It also covers how to create and use a Dataflow, including a demo. Dataflows are currently available in preview; they are a great way to use Power BI as an ETL tool and save time and cost of data preparation.

This webinar will teach you all you need to know to get started; watch the complete webinar below. If you’d like to view the slides from the presentation, you can view them here.

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