Mastering Azure Analytics, 1st Edition

Chapter 12. Performing Analytics

In this final chapter, we’ll pull things together to see how we can perform analytics against a lambda architecture built in Azure. Throughout the course of this book, you’ve seen examples of the technologies that act in support of the hot path, the cold path, or both. We have also explored some of the tradeoffs you can make between low latency/low precision and high latency/high precision.

When you are performing analytics against data in a data pipeline, the tools are as varied as those we used to perform the data preparation. Examples include using Excel and packaging up access to data stores in custom apps and APIs. In this chapter, we’ll take a look at using Power BI to create an analytics dashboard that reports against both hot and cold path data (see Figure 12-1).

Analytics with Power BI

Power BI provides a trio of tools for providing visualization and analytics against the data flowing through your data pipeline. There is the Power BI web application (also known as powerbi.com), which enables you to create and share visualizations using only a web browser. Second, the Power BI Desktop is a Windows-based, ClickOnce installed application that provides a similar user experience to the Power BI web application, but enables richer data munging and querying as well as support for an extensible library of visualizations provided by the community. Content created in the Power BI Desktop application can be published to the Power BI web application ...