The leading programs for do-it-yourself business analytics have long been Tableau And Qlik who have been working in this field for more than ten years. Since 2014, Microsoft has joined the leaders by releasing Power BI. Since then, Power BI has continually improved and is now a strong competitor to both Tableau and Qlik.

Tableau was already clearly nervous and began to compare its service with Power BI in its marketing materials. They recently created a presentation called “Weak sides Power BI"(link), including the following items:

• Fluctuations in values ​​are limited on the graphs to a range of 3,500 points
• It's difficult to do calculations in Power BI without learning the DAX language
• Built-in charts do not have forecasting (users need to know R for this)
• Tooltips cannot be customized
• Data cannot be grouped during operation
• No way to use someone else's dashboard as a starting point for additional analysis
• Difficulty adding descriptions to dashboards
• It's difficult to explore alternative scenarios due to the inability to enter/edit data directly in the Power BI dashboard.

Microsoft immediately responded to criticism of Tableau. “When comparing two products, you can always find features that only one of them has that the other lacks,” Amir Netz, Microsoft Business Intelligence technical specialist, tells Computer World. “Given this, I was pleasantly surprised to see the list of differences . It took Tableau a lot of effort to find them. What they pointed out is not even properties, but certain differences in some properties, some of which have already been eliminated and many more are in development.”

Microsoft also noted 10 advantages of Power BI over Tableau:

• Built-in drivers for dozens of data sources, allowing companies to easily connect to them
• Dashboards that bring important visualizations together at the highest level
• Natural language queries to explore data and create new visualizations
• Enterprise-grade SAAS BI including on-premises data connectivity
• Data processing, according to Microsoft, is 10 to 100 times faster than Tableau
• Custom visualizations available that use an open platform (Tableau platform is closed)
• Integration with Cortana, Excel and real-time data updates;
• Fast automatic data analysis
• Built-in ETL (extract, transform and load) tool
• Data model that supports a large number of tables and more complex relationships between them. (Tableau, according to Microsoft, only supports simple data models.)

Conditional Formatting (5)
Lists and ranges (5)
Macros (VBA procedures) (63)
Miscellaneous (39)
Excel bugs and glitches (3)

Introducing Power BI

What is Power BI?
First of all, I want to clarify that Power BI is not a part of Excel, but independent program for business analysis, which will need to be installed on your PC separately. But it's worth it. Power BI itself includes a large set of tools that allow you to process and display all the necessary information about any company indicators (and not only) using interactive visualization. Simply put, with Power BI you can easily and quickly, without extensive training or special skills, create beautiful interactive charts based on almost any data. It is now very fashionable to call such sets of visualizations “dashboards”:

A couple of things to know about Power BI first:

Power BI itself is divided into three applications (although you only need to install one):

• Power BI Desktop– the main application in which reports are created
• Power BI Service(Power BI service) - an online platform in which all reports created and sent for publication to the service are placed
• Power BI for Mobile– an application for smartphones and tablets that allows you to view reports published in the Power BI service

What you need to do and know before you start working in Power BI

• First you need to install the Power BI Desktop application, because... This is where all reports are prepared. You can download it from the link: https://powerbi.microsoft.com/ru-ru/desktop/
• As soon as the download starts, you will need to enter your data, including your e-mail. The same e-mail must be entered when you first launch and register the application. I would like to draw special attention to the fact that the e-mail must be corporate. Those. none there [email protected], [email protected], [email protected] etc. Otherwise, it may well turn out that you can create a report, but you won’t be able to publish it
• After installation and registration, you can start creating your first reports in Power BI

Once Power BI is launched, the main window will appear. To begin with, it is enough just to be able to navigate the work areas. In the screenshot below I tried to highlight the main work areas of this window


Menu button– opens a menu with access to basic commands and settings, such as Publish, Import and Export, Save, Help, Exit account Power BI, etc.

– the main tools for working with queries and visual elements are distributed on the tabs of this panel

Navigation by area- the main area is the visualization area (the first icon from the top), in which all visual reports are built. But you can also go to the table view to view data and change certain field parameters (Data types, Sorting, Adding columns and measures, etc.) and to a visual representation of the relationships between tables. You can also set up connections here.

Visualizations- this is probably one of the main areas of this window. This is where the buttons for creating charts themselves are located (they are called visual elements). Clicking on an icon reflecting an approximate appearance of a visual element automatically adds such an element to the visualization workspace.

Filters- this area allows you to create filtering of data entering the visual element. For example, having information on Income and Expenses in a data table, you can use filters to build a visual element only by expenses or only by income. The filter area is in turn divided into three sections:

• Visual Level Filters- filters placed here apply their effect exclusively to the visual element to which this filter applies
• Page level filters- filters placed here apply their effect to all visual elements of the page to which this filter applies
• Report Level Filters- extends its effect to all visual elements of all report pages

Fields- All fields of all query tables are listed here. It is on the basis of data in this area that visual elements are built. Adding data from fields to a visual element or filter area is done by simply dragging the mouse.

Just below the work area there is more sheet navigation area, where you can add it to the report new leaf, rename or delete existing ones.

When creating any request (tab home -To get data) another of the main windows will appear - the query window. For those who worked in Power Query from Excel, there is unlikely to be anything new there, because... Power BI has completely taken over the work with queries from Power Query:

Menu button– opens a menu with access to basic commands, such as Close, Save, as well as data source settings

Ribbon panel with a set of commands– as you might guess, this is the main work area, because It is on this panel on the tabs (Home, Transformation, Add Column, View) that the main tools for working with queries and data are distributed

Query area– All queries loaded into the current data model are listed here. Query names can be changed either by double-clicking the query name in the Query Area or by Current Query Property Panels.

Preview area– a preview of the type of data that will be loaded into the model after all our actions is displayed here. With its help, you can clearly see the resulting data set and identify errors.

Formula bar(Formula bar) – the text of the last action performed with the query is displayed here. The text is displayed in the built-in M language and can be changed directly in this line. You can show or hide it from the tab View -Formula bar.
Current Query Properties Panel– properties of the selected request are collected here. You can change the name of the query, and if you expand the All properties item, you can also give a description of the query and not include the query in the data update (by default, all queries loaded into the model are updated with one Refresh button from the main Power BI window).

Panel of operations performed in the request(Steps applied) is a very handy thing. All actions applied in the request are displayed here step by step: starting from loading the data and ending with the last transformation. If some operation in the request was done by mistake or the parameters were simply wrong, you can simply delete the last step (or several). We can say that this feature replaces the rollback of actions in office programs( Ctrl+Z). It is also very convenient to learn the syntax of the M language - you can see step by step what operation is called in this language. You can also view the entire text of the request by going to the tab View -Advanced Editor.

Briefly about the process of working in Power BI:

• first, the input data is loaded into the model and prepared (brought into a form convenient for creating visualizations) using Power Query
• then, based on the prepared data, diagrams and other visual reports are built using simple drag and drop without complex manipulations
• the created reports are uploaded to the cloud, where other users can view these reports from a browser or from mobile application

At the same time, you can work in Power BI without programming skills - to create visualizations, both the “push-button” functionality of the program and the built-in DAX formulas (Data Analysis Expressions), which are very similar to formulas in Excel, are enough. But for more advanced users there is room to expand - Power BI has its own programming language M, which allows you to expand standard features. Plus, it is possible to create your own individual visual elements using the R script editor. And by my visual elements, I mean my own, unique visualizations, and not just some mixed charts (like those in Excel). For those who don’t know how or don’t want to create it themselves, the collection of such custom elements is constantly updated on the Power BI website: https://app.powerbi.com/visuals/

Who is Power BI for?
Microsoft believes that Power BI will be useful for a small, medium or large company. I believe that such an application is necessary for everyone who is in one way or another involved in data analytics and building all kinds of reports.

Table of characteristics and differences between the basic version and Pro:

	Power BI	Power BI Pro
Basic characteristics
Cloud storage capacity (for storing reports in the Power BI service) per user	1 GB	10 GB
Create, view and share public access to personal dashboards and reports	YES	YES
Create reports in Power BI Desktop	YES	YES
Creating complex queries in the M query language	YES	YES
Access dashboards from mobile devices for iOS, Windows and Android management	YES	YES
Pre-installed algorithms for processing data from popular services such as: Dynamics, Salesforce and Google Analytics	YES	YES
Import source data and reports from Excel, CSV and Power BI Desktop files	YES	YES
Data Update
Scheduled data update interval	Daily	Hourly
Stream data to Power BI dashboards and reports	10,000 lines per hour	1,000,000 lines per hour
Connecting to data sources without manually updating and publishing information in Power BI (the data source is accessed when opening a report and the necessary data is loaded immediately)	NO	YES
Access to local data sources using a personal gateway (installed on Personal Computer and updating data from Excel and Power BI Desktop) and data management gateway (installed on a server with SQL Analysis Services)	NO	YES
Collaboration
Collaborate using Office 365 Groups	NO	YES
Creating, publishing and viewing pre-configured enterprise content sets (creating a content package with a set of dashboards that will be available to all users at the organization level, or to a specific group of users)	NO	YES
Managing access rights using Active Directory groups	NO	YES
Share queries using the Data Catalog (the ability to share queries through the Power Query add-in in Excel 2013)	NO	YES
Price	For free	RUB 7,450/year

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BI systems are analytical systems designed for business analysis that are capable of combining data from completely different sources of information. Data software systems process information and provide a report in a convenient interface for detailed study and subsequent evaluation of the information obtained in the process.

The resulting reporting data and its optimal use help in achieving business goals. Complex data analysis is the acquisition of knowledge, a kind of extraction from a mass of sources, including a business line, which can significantly increase the efficiency of the process and significantly reduce costs.

BI systems are a single, extremely transparent and complete source of all data about a company’s business for its administrative resources, but mainly for management.

Today, reporting generation and competent analysis are no longer a luxury, but rather a necessity for companies; reporting documentation is required both within the business and in each component of the entire process.

The solutions provided by the BI system are optimal for the preparation of all reporting, including covering all aspects of the business without exception; the presence of such capabilities is already considered mandatory and is considered together with other basic technologies as a corporate standard.

1. BI tools. These tools are divided into query and report generators, BI tools for analytical processing, corporate BI platforms and BI suites. The bulk of BI tools consists of enterprise BI suites and BI platforms. Query and report generation capabilities are largely being absorbed, or are being replaced by enterprise BI suites. OLAP mechanisms – operational analytical data processing or servers, including relational ones. OLAP engines are the infrastructure for BI platforms and BI tools. Most tools are used by users for access, as well as analysis, including the generation of reports, which in most cases are located in warehouses, a data mart, or an operational data warehouse.
2. BI applications. Applications that are not considered tools. An example is EIS - Information system for the leader.

Characteristic features of BI systems

• The systems use portal technologies that provide a single point of entry to the Internet and information space enterprises.
• The interface is presented in the form of a control panel or dashboard displaying several key indicators. This makes it possible to quickly assess the situation. It is also possible to quickly access key indicators by department and division; they are stored in a separate folder located on the dashboard.
• Multi-layer: all data is displayed in several layers, with each subsequent layer representing more detailed information regarding indicators, events or processes.
• Interactivity of BI systems, allowing the user to quickly navigate, including viewing data in various sections and sections, as well as “drilling” data, moving through various types of measurements. Users can directly perform operations on data.
• Manageability and relevance. Proactivity, which contains a rules engine that allows users to define goals and threshold limits for various types of indicators and determine at what data values ​​an alert should be issued. The system provides the ability to set parameters or indicators: if they reach critical values, alarm signals are issued to the monitor - visual and/or audio.
• Customization of BI systems - individual configuration of the console or dashboard for the level of control and user role. Personalization allows the user to independently select objects from authorized lists and arrange data on the dashboard according to their importance.
• Flexible access allows users to intuitively access the data and reports they need from a huge range of results reports and graphs, including remote access and mobile applications.
• Collaboration involves the simultaneous collaboration of a large group of employees, including viewing reports.

Magic quadrants

Competently assessing the state of the modern market, as well as giving a comprehensive objective description of its main players, is a rather non-trivial task. There are many manufacturers on the market that differ from each other in business size, organizational structures, management style, strategy and other factors.

This state of affairs significantly complicates the process of comparing them, and the direction of movement and development of the market is extremely ambiguous and difficult to predict. To solve this problem, a “magic quadrant” of BI systems was developed, which uses 2 indicators, one of them is the completeness of vision. The other is the ability to implement.

IN modern world there are certain classes software, which is focused mainly on the corporate segment (large and medium-sized businesses) and, accordingly, is not widespread. But some software systems have quite interesting functions that can be used not only in small businesses, but also as a personal tool. It is one of these software systems that will be discussed in this article.

Note

I am a technical specialist, so the article has a more technical slant. If you want to read information on the product aimed at business users, then go to the IBM offsite.

The main purpose of this article is to show you how to make your first “Hello World” (similar to programming) in IBM Cognos BI.

I also want to note that I have extensive experience in writing step-by-step instructions with screenshots of each step. But this article will not be another step by step instructions, here I want to show the concept of working with the system, and not make another manual.

What is BI?

So, what is a BI system? In three words, this is an advanced reporting system. To make it more clear, below I will list the main functions that they have modern systems class BI:

• ability to connect to various data sources (from an Excel file to a universal ODBC connection)
• the ability to build both simple reports (such as a graph or table) and complex parameterized reports with a combined structure and reference links (Drill-Trough, Drill-Up/Drill-Down)
• the ability to transparently work with different data sources (for example, Excel and SQL Server) with full processing of connections between them
• possibility of interactive work with data (generating reports “on the fly”)
• the ability to present relational data as multidimensional
• the ability to distribute access rights using both internal authentication sources and external ones (NTLM, LDAP, etc.)
• the ability to start generating reports either manually or automatically according to a schedule
• opportunity automatic mailing generated reports
• ability to generate reports in various formats (Excel, HTML, PDF, etc.)

In simple Russian language, a BI system is a program that provides the user with convenient tools for analyzing virtually any data (be it Excel file or industrial data storage).

Possibility of using the BI system as a personal tool

The question immediately becomes, how can you use this system as a personal tool? I will answer from a personal example, I use IBM Cognos BI as a tool for analyzing statistics in my projects and a tool for analyzing home accounting statistics.

Here, of course, you can object, something along the lines of “I can analyze statistics very well with ordinary SQL queries” or “built-in Excel functions It’s quite enough to analyze the entire household accounting,” but “everything is learned by comparison.” As practice shows, it’s much easier to just drag with the mouse necessary elements data and get the result in finished form, rather than fiddling with writing SQL queries or reconfiguring Excel functions.

Again, everything written is my personal opinion, with which you do not have to agree.

IBM Cognos BI architecture

The system architecture is relatively simple (as for an enterprise-class system). So, the key element of the system is the IBM Cognos BI server (see diagram below), which works with data sources using a user-created description (called metadata). Further, through Web access, the IBM Cognos BI server provides access to all the main functions of the system.

Conceptual architecture of the IBM Cognos BI complex (the diagram turned out to be very cumbersome)

Stages of working with the system

To make your first report you need to complete several basic steps:

1. Create a connection to a data source
2. Generate a description of the data source, i.e. create metadata
3. Create and publish a metadata package to the IBM Cognos BI server
4. Create report

Structure of the test data source

Before proceeding with the implementation of the above steps, I want to say a few words about the test data source. On the one hand, the structure of the test data source is relatively simple (as for an industrial data warehouse); on the other hand, it is somewhat more complex than a simple Excel sheet. All data in the source is synthetic (generated by algorithms based on random numbers), which is why the aggregate indicators look very even.

As you can see in the diagram above, the test database contains 3 hierarchical dimensions: “Product group -> Product”, “Continent -> Country -> City -> Retail outlet”, “Year -> Half year -> Quarter -> Month -> Date of"; 2 flat (one-dimensional) dimensions: “Cashier”, “Regional Manager”; and 2 fact tables: “Sales”, “Sales plan”.
Moreover, the “Cashier” dimension is located in one of the fact tables in a denormalized form, and the “Regional Manager” dimension is tied to the “Country” level of the “Retail Point” dimension by a “many to many” relationship (it is implied that one manager can manage different countries).

Connecting to a data source

In IBM Cognos BI, all necessary parameters for connecting to data sources are stored in special facilities systems that are called “Data Source Connections”. To create a new connection, you need to do a few things: simple steps: go to the IBM Cognos BI portal, go to the “Administration” section, open the “Configuration” tab, select the “Data Source Connections” subsection and click the “New” button data source" (“New Data Source”) in the toolbar. The series will appear next dialog boxes, in which you will need to set several parameters, such as connection name, connection type, server, login, password, etc.

Metadata development

Metadata development is one of the most difficult and responsible moments. Both the performance of the system (the speed of generating reports, the correctness of generated results, etc.) and the convenience of developing reports depend on the quality of metadata. But despite the above, the complexity of developing metadata is directly proportional to the complexity of the data source. For example, to build a relational description of our test data source, just launch the metadata creation wizard, click the “Next” button several times, and the metadata is ready.

So, as I wrote earlier, metadata is a description of the data source. In IBM Cognos BI. The foundation of metadata is Query Subject objects and the relationships between them. The “Query Subject” object is a synonym for “View” from relational DBMSs. That is, the “Query Subject” is based on a query to the DBMS that determines the structure of the source object, and the connections between the “Query Subject” are a description of the logical interaction between these queries.

To create metadata in IBM Cognos BI, a separate application, IBM Cognos Framework Manager, is used (the only non-Web application in the IBM Cognos BI suite). After launching Framework Manager, you will be prompted to create a new project (you will need to enter the name of the project and its location in the local file system).

Please understand that the Framework Manager project (also referred to as the Framework Manager model) is a collection of local files with whom he works local program, and the metadata package is the result, which is located on the IBM Cognos BI server (if we draw an analogy with programming, the project is the source code, and the package is the compiled application). You can create multiple sets of packages from a single Framework Manager project.

Once the Framework Manager project is created, the best place to start is by running the Metadata Import Wizard (Action -> Run Metadata Wizard...). The Import Wizard will prompt you to select an existing data source or create a new one and allow you to select the necessary objects to import. In the simplest case (for example, when the data source is an Excel file, which in 99.9% of cases contains data in denormalized form), you will need to set the fields of the “Query Subject” object correct type usage (“Usage” attribute), and here you can finish working with the Framework Manager model and begin generating and publishing a metadata package. In a more complex version (as in our test example), it will be necessary to check the correctness of the imported relationships between “Query Subject” objects, correct incorrect ones and add missing ones. In more professional options, it is possible to create calculated fields, change the “Query Subject” structure, create a multidimensional representation, define security algorithms, etc.

Create and publish a metadata package

After the metadata has been created, you need to create a metapackage and publish it to the IBM Cognos BI server. As I mentioned earlier, a metapackage is a subset of metadata that is published on the server and with which all Web applications of the IBM Cognos BI complex work. Metapack settings allow you to hide or not publish some metadata objects. For example, in the test metadata there is some “Query Subject”, which affects the logic of source data processing (it is the link between the country and the regional director), but is of no value when developing reports; it makes sense to hide such a metadata object at the package level. Or, for example, fields with identifiers, it also makes sense to hide them from metapackage users.

To create a metapackage, in the Framework Manager, in the “Packages” section, call context menu and select “Create -> Package”, after which the wizard for creating a metapackage will appear. After the metapackage is created, the system will immediately offer to publish it on the server. A novice user does not have to delve much into the options of the package publishing wizard (just click Next and Publish). The only thing is that on the last tab (where there will be not a Next button, but a Publish button) there will be a checkbox “Verify package before publishing”, it determines whether the metapackage is checked for logical ambiguities before publishing and displays a list of these ambiguities if they are found. I strongly recommend that you never skip this step and correct any ambiguities you find before publishing.

Generating reports (data analysis)

Now we are slowly approaching the most interesting and regular process - the creation of reports. It so happens that the tools for creating regular reports and the tools for quick data analysis in IBM Cognos BI are the same (despite the fact that in some it is more convenient to carry out quick analysis, and in others it is more convenient to generate regular reports, all of them allow you to save your results in the form reports).

Personally, I prefer to use the IBM Cognos Report Studio tool for all BI tasks. This is the most universal tool that allows you to build reports of virtually any complexity and at the same time provides relatively convenient tools for quick data analysis.

Let's assume that we need to create a quick report containing sales facts by country, product group and quarterly frequency. This fairly simple report can be made by following these steps:

1. launch the IBM Cognos Report Studio web application
2. In the welcome window, click the “create” button
3. in the list of basic templates, select “crosstab” (“corsstab”)
4. place the data elements according to the diagram shown below
5. run the report for execution

After running the report for execution, you will get something like this.

Looking at the resulting report, we can safely say that it is frankly poorly designed, the numbers are not formatted, the economic meaning is frankly questionable, etc. But all these design flaws can be removed by setting the properties of the corresponding settings elements, and to make the economic meaning more interesting, you can , for example, do a plan/fact analysis.

For example, to make the report shown below (on ready-made metadata), I, as an experienced specialist, spent about 20-30 minutes.

And to completely redesign it into a dark color scheme, I spent about another 10 minutes.

Conclusion

I hope that in this article the reader was able to get general information about BI systems and the principle of their operation. Of course, within the framework of a short article it is impossible to consider in relative detail any of the aspects raised (for example, an entire book could be written on how to correctly form metadata), but I think that if you decide to try, then this article will tell you where to start and what kind of expect results.

Also, I did not touch upon some interesting mechanisms and functions at all (for example, the mechanism for representing a relational data source as multidimensional), but this is due to the fact that the amount of necessary material (a minimum of theory and a minimum of practice) would be enough for a separate article.

A little about licenses

If you decide to buy a separate IBM Cognos BI system for personal use or for a small company, then the prices will probably unpleasantly surprise you, but IBM has a special comprehensive system, IBM Cognos Express, which is designed for small organizations and contains several products (including BI) and costs much less.

Have you heard about the Power BI tool from Microsoft? This is the hottest topic among internet marketers right now. Everyone wants to work with this service, but few know how. Our expert Rustam Gizatullin will introduce you to Power BI, show you its capabilities and applications for solving everyday problems.

What is Power BI from Microsoft?

Of course, it is impossible to describe all the capabilities of Power BI in one article. But after reading, you will be able to understand whether this product is interesting to you or not.

So, Power BI is a solution from Microsoft consisting of the Power BI Desktop application, the Power BI Mobile mobile application, and the Power BI Service WEB service.

Power BI allows you to:

• connect to a variety of data sources,
• process this data,
• present data in the form of convenient interactive reports.

Simply put, with Power BI you can retrieve data from Excel, SQL database, Yandex. Metrics and anywhere else in general. Then summarize this data, calculate new metrics and present them in the form of various visualizations: tables, matrices, graphs, diagrams, histograms, etc.

Here is an example of a report created using Power BI:

How does Power BI work?

As an example, let's look at creating a report based on data from Google Analytics and Yandex. Metrics.

To connect to data sources, process data and create reports, we need the Power BI desktop application. You can download it

Power BI by default can connect to all the most common data sources: files, databases, web analytics services, social networks, CRM systems, etc.

In this case, you can use third-party connectors written for Power BI. For example, I will use connectors to connect to Yandex. Metrica and Google Analytics from Maxim Uvarov.

Having collected the data, I pre-process it: I indicate the type for each field, filter it, remove unnecessary columns, etc.

Thus, I obtained the initial data from the analytics systems and calculated the missing metrics. Now based on them I can create various visualizations.

3. And now the most interesting thing, for the sake of which all this was started - creating visualizations for data analysis.

Using the built-in set of visualizations, you can create various interactive reports. At the same time, you can display both the data obtained during import and new metrics calculated based on the original data.

By uploading the created BI system to the WEB service, you will have access to the created reports from a browser, mobile application, or you will be able to publish the report in the public domain.

Conclusions and comments

1. If you constantly work with data, combine data from various sources, and these operations are not automated in any way, then Power BI is what the doctor ordered.

2. You can master working in Power BI on your own. The following links will help you:

• excellent