Introduction to Power BI and Power BI Architecture

Introduction to Power BI:

Power BI is the umbrella term for a set of data visualization, reporting, and analytics tools and services from Microsoft. Power BI can import data from various sources like MS Excel, CSV, JSON, and other online services and organize them to run queries, build reporting dashboards and data visualization.
Power BI has a set of components, which are available for different platforms and needs. These components together are called as Power BI.

1. Power Query: Data mash up and transformation tool.
2. Power Pivot: In-memory tabular data modelling tool
3. Power View: Data visualization tool
4. Power Map: 3D Geo-spatial data visualization tool
5. Power Q&A: Natural language question and answering engine.
6. Power BI Desktop: A powerful companion development tool for Power BI
7. Power BI Mobile Apps: Available in Android, iOS and Windows phone.

Enthusiastic about exploring the skill set of Power BI? Then, have a look at the Power BI Training Course together additional knowledge. 

Power BI Gateway

Power BI gateway is used to connect on premise data sources to Power BI desktop or Power BI cloud services to get continuous data for reporting and analytics.

Power BI Services

Power BI services is a cloud based subscription service. 

Related Article: Power BI Services And Benefits

Power BI Architecture

1. Sourcing Data
Power BI can source data from a vast number of file types and online services. You can import the data into Power BI or you can establish a live connection to service to get the data. If we import a file to Power BI, it limits the data sets to 1 GB compressed. If the data set is more than 1 GB then we can use Direct Query. 
There are two other options for accessing large data sets.

1. Azure analysis services
2. Power BI premium

List of Data Sources.
Files:

• Excel
• Text/CSV
• XML
• JSON
• Folder
• SharePoint Folder

Database;

• SQL Server Database
• Access Database
• SQL Server Analysis Services Database
• Oracle Database
• IBM DB2 Database
• IBM Informix database (Beta)
• IBM Netezza (Beta)
• MySQL Database
• PostgreSQL Database
• Sybase Database
• Teradata Database
• SAP HANA Database
• SAP Business Warehouse server
• Amazon Redshift
• Impala
• Google BigQuery (Beta)
• Snowflake

Azure:

• Azure SQL Database
• Azure SQL Data Warehouse
• Azure Analysis Services database (Beta)
• Azure Blob Storage
• Azure Table Storage
• Azure Cosmos DB (Beta)
• Azure Data Lake Store
• Azure HDInsight (HDFS)
• Azure HDInsight Spark (Beta)

Online Services:

• Power BI service
• SharePoint Online List
• Microsoft Exchange Online
• Dynamics 365 (online)
• Dynamics 365 for Financials (Beta)
• Common Data Service (Beta)
• Microsoft Azure Consumption Insights (Beta)
• Visual Studio Team Services (Beta)
• Salesforce Objects
• Salesforce Reports
• Google Analytics
• appFigures (Beta)
• comScore Digital Analytix (Beta)
• Dynamics 365 for Customer Insights (Beta)
• Facebook
• GitHub (Beta)
• Kusto (Beta)
• MailChimp (Beta)
• Mixpanel (Beta)
• Planview Enterprise (Beta)
• Projectplace (Beta)
• QuickBooks Online (Beta)
• Smartsheet
• SparkPost (Beta)
• SQL Sentry (Beta)
• Stripe (Beta)
• SweetIQ (Beta)
• Troux (Beta)
• Twilio (Beta)
• tyGraph (Beta)
• Webtrends (Beta)
• Zendesk (Beta)

Other:

• Vertica (Beta)
• Web
• SharePoint List
• OData Feed
• Active Directory
• Microsoft Exchange
• Hadoop File (HDFS)
• Spark (Beta)
• R Script
• ODBC
• OLE DB
• Blank Query