PowerBI

Enhancing Your PowerBI Experience

The Nathean Power BI Connector

The Nathean Power BI Connector is a custom connector for Microsoft Power BI and is a module that extends Power BI’s capabilities to connect to data sources not covered by Power BI's existing connectors. The Nathean Power BI Connector is now fully supported in Power BI Desktop, the On Premise Data Gateway (Personal and Enterprise), and Power BI Premium (via the Gateway). The Nathean Power BI Connector supports both the refresh of data in Power BI Solutions through import as well as direct query.

Our Power BI Connector provides comprehensive Data Governance services which greatly enhances what is available in Power BI Desktop, Pro and Premium

What we like about PowerBI

You get to pretty much instant satisfaction when importing data with Power BI Desktop and showing a visualization within a few seconds. It’s that same satisfaction we get from Excel.
And Power BI Desktop is free for most users whereas Power BI Premium is not and it’s not small change. But with Power BI Desktop and Power BI Pro at a low cost, you can get a lot done. Particularly if your analysis only has to be shared will a few people.
Managers love it. It’s free, it’s quick, they don’t need to commit to a Power BI Premium subscription.

The not so good

Power BI solutions tend to get built from the front-end outwards. By this we mean that that with the instant satisfaction, users will tend to start with the visualizations, create a dataset using their Power BI Desktop tool and get that visualization correct. They then share it. What remains is the problem of managing that data asset themselves rather than letting a central service handle it.

For example, you create a dashboard which covers data from multiple departments. You will want to share this with multiple departments but they shouldn’t have access to each other’s data. No problem, you say, I’ll create a role and filter the data by department so each user will only see their own department. And that does do the job, but let’s say that instead you need to limit the data by user and there are thousands of users. The same approach will work, but each user ends up downloading all users’ data and filtering to it their own. This creates a couple of difficulties:

The could be a large volume of data downloaded to each user , so a bandwidth or timing issue.
This might cause data governance or privacy issues where the data is technically downloaded to users who should not have access to the data. Make is commercial data and your customers will not approve of the approach.

Nathean Analytics - Empowering PowerBI

Unless the data is only being shared by a handful of users, most organisations will find themselves needing to get a license for Power BI Premium. Nathean Analytics provides an alternative and takes up where Power BI finishes. Nathean Analytics provides the following services out -f-the-box which makes it an easy pathway for Power BI Desktop and Power BI Pro solutions.

Nathean Analytics has a better approach for role based security. The end user (as they connect with their Nathean Analytics user name and password), will only ever download the data they should have access it. Contrast this will the Power BI role-based approach of downloading all data and filtering it. Even it’s not visible there are governance issues with the Power BI approach.
All data accessed through Nathean Analytics is governed and audited.
Nathean Analytics provides a fully integrated pixel perfect reporting service which shares all the datasets and governance as used by the dashboards rather than Power BI Servers’s extra service/server add on. No need to duplicate dataset definition and maintenance with Nathean Analytics.