Power BI Analytics - Connect to DBMS and Card

Power BI supports connecting to most of the DBMS databases such as SQL Server, Oracle, Teradata, MySQL, DB2, Sybase, Snowflake, Google BigQuery, Impala and etc.

This page summarizes the steps to connect to SQL Azure and to create the following part of the sample dashboard of this series:

Step-by-step guide

Open Power BI Desktop and Get Data

Click the following button in the menu:

In the Get Data windows, choose tab Azure and then select Azure SQL database in the panel.

You can also select the databases you want to connect instead of SQL Azure.

Click Connect button.

Input database connection details

Input server address and database. Choose Import as Data Connectivity mode. Ensure Include relationship columns option is checked.

Click OK button to continue.

Input credentials to connect. For SQL Azure, ensure firewall rule is configured to allow the database connection from your current IP address.

Select data tables

In the Navigator window, select the tables you want to include into this model:

In my case, I’ve selected all the tables that are required for this dashboard.

Click Load button to load data into the model.

View relationships

Click view relationships button on the left side of the workspace.  The relationships of the tables are shown in a diagram:

You can add more relationships based on requirement. The following relationships are supported:

• One to many: 1:*
• Many to one: *:1
• One to one: 1:1

Create a Card chart

Card is one of the simple visualizations you can create in Power BI. It is usually used to show a single number such as total sales, total views and etc.

For more details about Card, visit the following page:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/power-bi-visualization-card

Click the following highlighted icon to drag a Card visualization into the report.

Drag one of the field from one of the table into the Fields placeholder:

Change the aggregation method to Count:

And then click Rename in the above context menu, and change it to the name you want it to be.

You can further customize the format through the Format panel:

Once it is done, you will have a similar Card visualization like the following:

Create other Card visualizations

Follow the same steps to create all the Card visualizations you need. For example, the sample dashboard contains four cards of different metrics.