What is Power BI?: Architecture and Features Explained

What is Power BI?: Architecture and Features Explained

Lesson 1 of 3By Avijeet Biswal

Last updated on Jun 5, 2024462667

PreviousNext

Table of Contents

What is Power BI??

Why Power BI?

Advantages Of Power BI

Disadvantages Of Power BI

Power BI Architecture

View More

Power BI is a technology-driven business intelligence tool provided by Microsoft for analyzing and visualizing raw data to present actionable information. It combines business analytics, data visualization, and best practices that help an organization to make data-driven decisions. In February 2019, Gartner confirmed Microsoft as Leader in the "2019 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Analytics and Business Intelligence Platform" as a result of the capabilities of the Power BI platform.

What is Power BI??

Power BI is a business analytics service provided by Microsoft that lets you visualize your data and share insights. It converts data from different sources to build interactive dashboards and Business Intelligence reports.

As you see above, we have some sales data in an excel sheet. Using this data, Power BI helps you build different charts and graphs to visualize the data.

Now that you have learned what is Power BI, let us now understand why Power BI is required.

Why Power BI?

Following are the reasons why Power BI is so popular and needed in the BI domain:

1. Access to Volumes of Data from Multiple Sources

Power BI can access vast volumes of data from multiple sources. It allows you to view, analyze, and visualize vast quantities of data that cannot be opened in Excel. Some of the important data sources available for Power BI are Excel, CSV, XML, JSON, pdf, etc. Power BI uses powerful compression algorithms to import and cache the data within the.PBIX file.

2. Interactive UI/UX Features?

Power BI makes things visually appealing. It has an easy drag and drops functionality, with features that allow you to copy all formatting across similar visualizations.

3. Exceptional Excel Integration?

Power BI helps to gather, analyze, publish, and share Excel business data. Anyone familiar with Office 365 can easily connect Excel queries, data models, and reports to Power BI Dashboards.

4. Accelerate Big Data Preparation with Azure?

Using Power BI with Azure allows you to analyze and share massive volumes of data. An azure data lake can reduce the time it takes to get insights and increase collaboration between business analysts, data engineers, and data scientists.

5. Turn Insights into Action?

Power BI allows you to gain insights from data and turn those insights into actions to make data-driven business decisions.

6. Real-time Stream Analytics

Power BI will enable you to perform real-time stream analytics. It helps you fetch data from multiple sensors and social media sources to get access to real-time analytics, so you are always ready to make business decisions.

Now, in this what is Power BI article, you will learn about the architecture of Power BI.

Advantages Of Power BI

1. User-friendly interface: Power BI has an intuitive interface allowing users to visualize and analyze data easily.
2. Data integration: Power BI allows users to easily integrate data from various sources, including Excel, SQL Server, and cloud-based sources like Azure and Salesforce.
3. Customizable dashboards: Users can create customized dashboards and reports to display data in a way that is meaningful to them.
4. Real-time data: Power BI supports real-time data processing, which means users can view up-to-date data in their dashboards and reports.
5. Collaboration: Power BI allows users to share their dashboards and reports with others, making collaborating on data analysis projects easy.

Disadvantages Of Power BI

1. Limited data processing capabilities: Power BI is not designed for heavy-duty data processing and may struggle with large datasets or complex queries.
2. Limited customization options: While Power BI offers a range of customization options, users may find that they are limited in their ability to create truly unique visualizations and reports.
3. Cost: Power BI is not a free tool, and users may need to pay for additional features or storage space.