Companies in the Big Data industry are now more than ever looking for practical, simple tools for data retrieval, storage, and visualisation that will allow them to easily store and use the data they collect to make business decisions.
Analysis and visualisation:
Power BI is among the most powerful data analysis and visualisation tools created by Microsoft to turn raw data into interactive insights. Power BI has the ability to pull data from many sources, clean it, analyze it, and then create visuals that are easy to understand and actionable.
SQL Relational Databases:
Relational SQL Databases (such as MySQL, Azure SQL, PostgreSQL) excel at handling large volumes of structured data with ACID compliance, ensuring integrity, consistency, and security through features like indexing and stored procedures.
Importance of SQL databases for storing and managing analytical data.
In most organizations, vital business operation records or data, such as sales transactions, inventory data, and financial metrics, are stored in a central SQL database rather than several scattered spreadsheets.
SQL Databases enable different departments in a company to have a central source of information that they can all rely on for business operations, which enables cohesion and unified, data-informed decisions across the departments.
Benefits of intergrating with Power Bi for Analysis:
Integrating Power BI to a company's database allows the relevant stakeholders to view and easily access real-time, reliable, and scalable business intelligence stored in their centralised database.
SQL databases provide the robust foundation that turns raw data/records into actionable insights when paired with visualization tools like Power BI.
How to connect Power BI to a PostgreSQL Database Locally.
- Launch your Power BI Application and click the Get data option, scroll down the options, and click More options:
- Select the 3rd option labelled Databases and scroll down the database options till you get your preferred database.
- Launch your DBMS and navigate to your connection details. Note down your database name, your port number, and host/server details. In this case, I am using DBEAVER to manage my Postgres database.
- Enter the Host details, database name, username, and password from your DMBS connection details and connect to the database.
- Once connected, it will load the tables in your database into Power BI, select the tables you would like to use, and click " Transform " to load your data into the Power Query for cleaning
- After cleaning, load the data into the model view, create and review the relationships between the tables using the common columns.
How to connect Power BI to a cloud service, Aiven PostgreSQL.
- On your browser, navigate to
console.aiven.ioand login to your aiven account.
- Connect your database by first creating a service on the Aiven console by clicking the "create service " button. Select your DB in the options provided.
- Click on the new service you created and open the service overview page, and obtain the connection details from Aiven (host, port, database name, username, and password).
- In the service overview page, download the SSL certificate and save it on your PC. The file format saved is
ca.pem.Rename toca.crt.
Now let's connect your Aiven service to your Database Management system.
- Launch your DBMS; in this case, I am using Dbeaver to manage my PostgreSQL database. Enter the connection details you had earlier recorded from your Aiven service: Database name, Host details, user name, and password.
In conclusion, integrating a powerful analysis and visualisation tool like Power BI with your central database allows the company to leverage the efficiency with which a relational DB like PostgreSQL handles the storage, computation, and management of large sets of data, coalesced with the ability of Power BI to extract that data from multiple sources, clean analyse, and prepare interactive dashboards and reports that will propel business growth
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