Microsoft Power BI Self-Service Data Preparation Gets Big Data Boost

Power BI's updated self-service data preparation tools will allow Excel experts to analyze big data using Power Query. Microsoft has upgraded the self-service data preparation capabilities in Power BI to help business users extract more meaningful insights from big data stored in their software-as-a-service applications and other sources using familiar tools. Growing demand for SaaS business applications has created a problem for organizations looking to create a data-driven culture in the workplace, according Arun Ulagaratchagan, general manager of Power BI Engineering at Microsoft. Those applications become data silos, each requiring specialized IT expertise to convert it into information that their business intelligence tools can use. As part of a series of updates that Microsoft will be rolling out in preview beginning in July, Power BI users will be able to more easily incorporate big data, including web analytics and information generated by Internet of Things (IoT) deployments, into their models, dashboards and reports, Ulagaratchagan announced. This is made possible by expanding the boundaries of what Power Query can do. Power Query, a familiar tool among Excel users, allows users to extract, combine, transform and clean data from multiple sources, and then import data using a format that works with Excel. It supports a variety of enterprise data sources, including Oracle, IBM DB2, Sybase, and of course, Microsoft's own SQL Server database.