Something More....

After I wrote the other two posts and shared the same with few of my colleagues, a lot of question poured in asking ‘How about this..?’ or ‘Can we do this…?’, etc and one question asked by our very own Hyperion Jedi (Ahmed Hafez) left me intrigued looking for answers to ‘Can we have hierarchy driven report in Power BI when connecting to PBCS?’ This kept me busy for a few hours with an outcome, the snapshots of which look something like below. The first chart shows the top-level entity roll-up ‘All Entities’, providing an option to drill-down to BUs. The same action can be performed on BUs to lead to entities. Let’s look at the steps to achieve the required hierarchical structure. I would not talk about the steps to connect Power BI to PBCS and how to parse data, rather suggest to go through Part 1 and Part 2 of this post. In past posts, we utilised the concept of calling PBCS export data slice web service to pull data and parse it. In addition to pulling data slice, we woul...

This post is in continuation to Part 1 of the same topic in which I talked about how PBCS REST APIs can be used to pull data as JSON response. We used the Postman app to view our results. In this post, we will see how we can make a call to an HTTP POST request and parse the JSON response within Power BI. Note: I am not a Power BI expert and method shared herein is one such way of doing this. There might be more efficient ways to achieve the same where Power BI experts can help. Power BI offers a lot of inbuilt connectors and methods to pull data from discrete sources and they serve the purpose perfectly. But in certain cases, prebuilt connectors do not serve the purpose and that’s when “Blank Query” brings out its magic, helping to connect to anything which can be defined in Query terms. Because Power BI’s Web connector makes an HTTP GET request by default, we cannot use it to execute our data slice REST API which is POST in nature. Thus we use the Query to enable Power BI to m...

“Visualization gives you answers to questions you didn’t know you had.” – Ben Schneiderman . Undoubtedly, visualization is playing a vital role in today’s corporate world. The data is no longer confined to tables or worksheets, be it a CXO or analyst, its far easy to consume information and report via pretty visuals knit together into colourful dashboards. This has lead to an upward trend of visualization tools like Oracle Analytics Cloud (OACS), Microsoft Power BI, Qlik Sense, Tableau, etc. With each product bringing its own benefits to the table, it is important for the firms to invest in the best and harness each product’s capability. PBCS might be a leading planning and budgeting SaaS application but doesn’t offer all dashboarding capabilities or the varied charts available with Power BI. Similarly, Power BI or OACS are best for dashboards not for planning and budgeting. Not all firms invest in OACS with PBCS and tend to have a heterogeneous architecture of BI products. Thu...