Power BIStreaming DatasetsGreg McMurrayUtah Power BI Users Group, February 2017

Greg McMurray Currently Business Solutions Developer at WECC Manager at Aritus Computer Services for 18 years Aerospace, Branding & Marketing, Energy, Healthcare, Software Active in many local user groups Find me online

@goyuix https://www.linkedin.com/in/goyuix https://stackoverflow.com/cv/goyuix - top 3% of users

Western Electricity Coordinating Council (WECC) Non-profit to ensure the reliability of the western interconnection Approved Regional Entity by Federal Energy Regulatory Commission Create, monitor & enforce reliability standards Publish various models and independent perspective Covers 14 western states, 2 Canadian provinces and Baja Mexico

Real-time Streaming Datasets Preview announced in August 2016

https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/real-time-in-no-time-with-power-bi/ Released to general availability in January 2017

https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/announcing-general-availability-of-power-bi-real-time-streaming-datasets/

Datasets available through REST API or via PubNub Example: Azure Stream Analytics pushes to REST API

Optionally store historic values Important Note: Dashboards auto-refresh. Reports require manual refresh.

Example: Current Load on Western Interconnection

Creating a Streaming Dataset Login to powerbi.com portal Under your workspace create a new Streaming Dataset

This is different than a regular dataset, and isn’t an option there We will create a sample for holding random numbers with the following schema

Value : Number Min : Number Max : Number Stamp : DateTime

Enable Historical Analysis

REST API: Adding Data via PowerShell Each Streaming Dataset has a unique Push URL

Looks like https://api.powerbi.com/beta/guid/datasets/guid/rows Has an encoded access key parameter as well

Base64 encoded, 64 bytes long Doesn’t appear to be a string representation of anything special – just bytes

POST to this URL with a JSON string Needs to be an array of objects that represent each row Example: [ { “Value”:50 } ]

Demo: Sending Random Numbers

Some Gotchas Dashboards auto-refresh to show latest data but… Reports need to be manually refreshed

There are a bunch of suggestions on ideas.powerbi.com to automate refreshes https://ideas.powerbi.com/forums/265200-power-bi-ideas/suggestions/14950986-add-

rest-api-to-refresh-data-sources Streaming charts are extremely touchy – you will break them

Issue reported in Sep-2016, Under Review as of October… https://ideas.powerbi.com/forums/360879-issues/suggestions/16418866-streaming-da

taset-dashboard-line-chart-bug

Discussion: What are good examples? Some common examples:

Bulk Electric System (of course!) Temperature Traffic Counters

What do these all have in common? Similar values Steady values / changes

They also can trigger actions: Change in generation, HVAC, traffic signals