PowerBI Report Export in csv format via Rest API - api

PowerBI provided CSV format export API for Paginated Reports alone, not for normal reports which support only pbix, ppt, png formats via Export API.
Reference: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/rest/api/power-bi/reports/exporttofile
Is there any API to export normal PowerBI reports in CSV format?
If not, is there any API to get the exact data present in a particular report?
Can you please help me with a solution/clarity on this since am looking for it for a long time.

No, there is no API to export Power BI report to CSV. When designed properly, this should be exported from the data source, which is used to build the Power BI report itself. There are still some options to do that, but you may not like them though.
First, you can use some client library to connect to the dataset's XMLA endpoint, but this requires Premium (announcement here and for read/write here).
The other options, like Analyze in Excel and exporting data from visualization, has manual steps and bad limitations, which you may try to simulate, but I don't think this is a good solution.
As I conclusion, the best solution would be to make proper layers and avoid exporting data from the report layer at all.

Related

Automate data transforming ( SQL) and then push processed data to Tableau

I have questions about ways to automate data transformation process.
What I normally do is that I transform data using python or postgresql and then export the processed data as csv. After that, I connect the csv file to Tableau.
I have done some research and found that ETL can help. However, I've watched some ETL tools' demo videos, and I'm not sure whether these tools' transform features would meet my need or not. For example, I have written 100+ sql lines for one of my data transforming task; it's better if I can use postgresql to run the query instead of using ETL tools.
The problem is that I don't know what's the proper way to automate the data transforming process and then push the data to Tableau. The csv files will be updated on a daily basis, so I'll need to refresh the data.
Data transformation can be done in various ways. It depends on your nature of data to figure out what can be the right fit.
If you have huge volume of data and you are comfortable in python/java and you can automate your transformation logic using spark and write it to a hive table and then connect tableau to read data from hive.
Most of the next gen ETL tools like pentaho and talend can be used but that erodes the flexibility and portability what a framework like spark or beam can give.
If you want to know , how can you achieve this using cloud provider services like GCP or AWS , please let me know
Prep is the Tableau tool for preparing data. It can be used for joining, appending, cleaning, pivoting, filtering and other data cleansing activities.
Tableau Prep is available:
for free if you have a Tableau Creator license
in desktop and Online/ Tableau server versions
Scheduling Prep flows is available in Tableau Online/ Server. To schedule flows you will need to acquire the Tableau Prep Conductor add-on.

Power BI - Getting data from sources with no direct API

I am working on designing a Power BI dashboard and would require some insights on the source of data. My source of financial data comprises of Kyriba, Bloomberg and ClearWater Analytics. However, no API exists for either of these in Power BI. What’s the best way to pull data from these sources into PowerBI? Manual generation of excel always? Need assistance in understanding the best way to automate this process? Thank You!
unfortunately or maybe fortunately these sites are highly secured, so at the moment there is no connector to these companies' data. But I am quite sure that there are some automatic extraction in csv files or even excel files. Once you have these files you can do everything you want in your Power BI.
Maybe you can contact your IT to check if there is any ftp channel possible to automate the import.
Good luck!

Is tableau able to access data dynamically?

Usually a Tableau dashboard operates on "static" data that are "attached" to the published dashboard. I wonder if it is possible to make Tableau able to read data on-the-fly (when a user interacts with it). By that I mean that the data, that should be visualized, are taken from a data base that can by "dynamic". It means, for example, that the data shown by Tableau today and yesterday should not be the same because content of the database might change. Alternatively, we might try to retrieve data from an API. For example Tableau sends a request to a HTTP server and gets a data table in form of JSON and than visualizes it. Is Tableau able to do that?
Yes, Tableau can connect to live data sources such as any number of database technologies. No, it cannot send HTTP requests for JSON directly. It does a have web data connection feature if you or someone has built that web service. Here are some tips on when to use Live connections versus taking an Extract. http://mindmajix.com/use-direct-connection-data-extract-tableau/

Which dashboard analytics will support Parse.com data source?

I've developed an app that uses Parse.com as the back end. I now need a dashboard analytics software package (such as iDashboards) that will enable me to pull data from my Parse.com database classes and present some of that data in a pretty dashboard fashion.
iDashboards looks to be the kind of tool i'm after, but it only supports certain data source inputs such as JDBC, ODBC, SQL, MySQL etc. Not being a database guru by any means, i'm not sure if Parse.com can be classed as any of the above, but from what i've read it doesn't come under any of these categories.
Can anybody recommend a way of either connecting Parse.com to iDashboard, or suggest another dashboard tool that will support Parse.com as a data source?
The main issue you are facing is that data coming out of Parse.com is going to be in json format. Most dashboards are going to prefer csv files.
The best dashboard I am aware of is Tableau and there is a discussion about getting json into Tableau here: http://community.tableau.com/ideas/1276
If your preference is using iDashboards then you need to convert the json coming out of Parse into a csv format that iDashboards can consume. You can do that using RJSON as mentioned in the post above but you'll probably have an easier time of it with a simple php or python script that periodically connects to Parse and pulls out data updates for you and then pushes it to your dashboard of choice.
Converting json to csv in php is addressed here: Converting JSON to CSV format using PHP
The difference is much more fundamental than "unsupported file format". In fact, JSON data coming out of Parse is stored in a so-called denormalized form, which means that a single JSON data file may contain the equivalent of arbitrarily many tables in a relational database. Stated differently, one JSON file may translated into potentially many CSV files, and there's no unique choice of how to perform that translation.
This is a so-called ETL problem, where ETL stands for Extract-Transform-Load. As such, you may be interested in open source ETL tools such as Kettle. Kettle is supported by Pentaho and includes functionality that can help you develop a workflow to turn JSON data into multiple CSV files that can then be imported into iDashboards (or similar). Aside from Kettle, Talend is also widely used for this purpose and has the same ability.
Finally, note that Parse is powered by MongoDB, and exports JSON data that is easily stored and manipulated in MongoDB. As such, a natural fit for reporting on Parse data is any reporting tool built for MongoDB.
As of the time of this writing, there are two such options:
JSON Studio, which is a commercial solution that is built explicitly for MongoDB and has your stated capability to produce dashboards.
SlamData, which is an open source solution, also built for MongoDB, which allows native SQL on the database. The current version does not have reporting capabilities (just CSV export), but the 2.09 version due out in June has reporting dashboards baked in.
An advantage of using a MongoDB reporting tool is that you will not have to wrangle your data into relational form. If it's heavily nested, using arrays, and so forth, it can be quite painful to develop an ETL workflow and keep it in sync with how the data is changing. Instead, all you have to do is built a script to pipe the raw data from Parse into a MongoDB instance (perhaps hosted by MongoLab or equivalent, if you don't want to host it yourself), and connect the MongoDB reporting tool on top.
You might also contact Parse and see if they have a recommended solution for this. It occurs to me they should probably bake some sort of analytical / reporting functionality into their APIs as this is such a common use case.
You can use Axibase Time-Series Database to ingest your data from parse.com and they have built in dashboards and widgets for visualization or you can just export data from ATSD to csv and use iDashboards.

The Pentaho BI Platform Workflow Issue

I have been working with Pentaho for the last few days. I have been able to setup the Pentaho Report Designer to generate a sample report by follow their documentation. Then I follow this article http://www.robertomarchetto.com/www/how_to_use_pentaho_report_designer_tutorial and managed to export the report to Pentaho BI server.
All I don't understand is Pentaho workflow. What should be the process I should follow which means what's the purpose of exporting the export to Pentaho BI server? Why there is a Data Integration tool? Why there is a BI sever when I can export the report from the Designer tool?
Requirement
All I want to do is retrieve the data from the MYSQL DB. Put them into a data-mart. Then from the data-mart generate a report.(According to what I have read, creating a data mart is the efficient way).
How can I get it done?
Pentaho Data Integration can be used to make this report generation automated.
In report designer you will be passing a parameter or set of parameters to generate a single report output.
With Data integration you can generate the reports for different set of parameters. for eg: if reports are generated on daily basis, we can make it automated for the whole month, so that there is no need of generating reports daily and manually.
And using the Pentaho Business Intelligence server we can make all these operations scheduled.
To generate Data/Table(Fact tables/dimension table) in MYSQL DB From difference source like files/different DB - Data Integration tool comes in to picture .
To create Schema on top of Fact tables - Mondrian tool
To handle user/roles on top of created cubes -Meta data editor
To create simple reports on top of small tables - Report Designer
For sequential Execution (at a go) usage of DI jobs/transformation , Reports, Java script - Design Studio
thanks to user surya.thanuri # forums.pentaho.com
The Data Integration tool is mostly for ETL, it's a separate tool and you can ignore it unless you are doing complex analysis of data from multiple dissimilar data sources. You don't need to 'export' reports to the pentaho server, you can write them directly to a directory then refresh the repository from inside the Pentaho web application. Exporting them is just one workflow technique.
You're going to find that there are about a dozen ways to do any one thing with Pentaho. For instance I use the CDA datasources with my reports vice placing the sql code inside my report. Alternatively you can link up to a Data Integration server to execute the Data Integration scripts to view a result set.
Just to answer your datamart question. In general a datamart should probably be supported by either the Data Integration tool (depending on your situation I don't exactly recommend this) or database functions/replication streams (recommended).
Just to hazard a guess, it sounds like someone tossed you a project saying: We need a BI system, here's the database where the data is stored, here are the reports we're already getting. X looked at Pentaho and liked it. You should use that.
First thing you need to do is understand the shape of the data, volume, tables, interrelations. Figure out what the real questions they want to answer are. Determine whether they need real time reporting, etc..etc. Just getting the datamart together itself, if you even need one, can take quite awhile. I think you may have jumped the gun on Pentaho itself.
thanks to user flamierd # forums.pentaho.com