Open Source PowerBI REST API for Java

By Satalyst Brilliance on 07 Sep 2015

Satalyst does a lot of work managing organisations' data and integrating systems together, one of the challenges managing this data is providing visualisations that give insight into how a business is performing.

One area of interest that Satalyst has been focusing on is in the area of real-time analytics and actionable insights, especially related to the growing field of the Internet of Things (IoT). Microsoft PowerBI, has the ability to create simple visualisations from real-time data and present them quickly through a web-browser using a simple RESTful API.

Whilst there is a REST API for interacting with PowerBI, there's no simple API wrapper written for Java. The prototype I’ve been working on is written in Java, so I needed to create a wrapper for the PowerBI REST API. After a lot of research on the internet, it appears that there are a large number of people crying out for a Java library to use to interact with the API, so I figured we should open source ours.

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Power BI vs Datazen

By Satalyst Brilliance on 20 Jul 2015

As you may have heard, Microsoft acquired Datazen in April 2015 to boost their BI dashboarding and mobility offering. This announcement has left a lot of people confused - where does Datazen fit in the Microsoft BI roadmap? Does Datazen compete with Power BI? Complement Power BI?

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Power Query: Creating a parameterized function in M

By Satalyst Brilliance on 19 May 2015

This will be part two in my on-going series about Power BI, Power Query, and the general joys of data. In my last post I outlined how to iterate over a list in Power Query. But what if I want to iterate over a list and need to parameterize it with today’s date? What if I want to issue multiple web requests based on a list? This is exactly the scenario I had when trying to fetch crime data from the WA Police web site. First, I have to thank my colleague and web wizard John Chillemi who authored the azure website that I’m using. The WA Police site has all the data, but not in a nice HTML table, which is what Power Query needs. So, thanks to John, I can execute a single web request and get a webpage that looks like this:   The web request takes five parameters – Suburb, Start Month, Start Year, End Month, and End Year, as seen below: I’d like to execute that web request for every suburb in Western Australia (there are over 1300 by my count) so obviously this is a case for automation, which means I need an M parameterized…

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