The Rise of Power BI
By Sandya Rani Gattupalli, Senior Software Engineer and Timmanagouda Timmanagouda, Senior Software Engineer/ iGaming OPS Business Intelligence
Microsoft Power BI is a self-service BI (business intelligence) visualization tool that allows you to connect easily to various sources of data and turn them into visually immersive and interactive insights. It is a collection of software services, apps, and connectors that is a critical tool for the data team at Light & Wonder iGaming. Power BI can be your personal visualization tool and can serve as the analytics and decision engine behind group projects, divisions, or entire corporations.
Power BI has three main components Power BI Desktop, Power BI Service, and Power BI App — which are designed to let people create, share and consume business insights in the way that serves them most effectively. The common flow of activity of these elements goes like this:
- Add your data into Power BI Desktop, and create a report;
- Publish the Power BI Desktop report into Power BI Service, where you can create new visualizations or build dashboards and share them with others. Power BI Service is a cloud-based service that requires licensing; and
- View and interact with the shared dashboards and reports using Power BI Mobile Apps.
We can also share the Reports using Power BI Report Server which is an on-premises solution with a web portal, in which you display and manage reports and KPIs. Users can access these reports via a web browser or mobile device, or as an email in their inbox. Power BI Report Server comes with Microsoft SQL Server Enterprise edition or with a Power BI Premium license.
Power BI Architecture:
Sample Report/Dashboard:
GAME STATISTICS — This dashboard gives us a high-level understanding of revenue generated based on game hierarchy and date hierarchy. It also helps us to find the player’s interests and tendencies.
PAYMENT SUMMARY — This report provides insights into different payment providers and their performance by comparing different dimensions such as Payment Year, Payment Method, and Payment Status, which helps in decision-making in a business. Also, we can derive Providers with high success rates.
SSRS vs Power BI
Performance in Power BI
Performance tuning in Power BI involves making changes to the current state of the data model so that reports/dashboards run more effectively.
DAX (Data Analysis Expression) is a programming language used in Power BI for creating calculations/KPIs or Custom tables. In case any report/dashboard is taking time to load or refresh we can revisit the Data Model and DAX calculations applied.
Some of the performance optimization best practices are:
- Minimizing the size of the data model and making the most efficient use of the data in the model;
- Reviewing the performance of DAX Measures, relationships, and visuals;
- Use variables to improve performance and troubleshooting;
- Improve performance by reducing cardinality levels;
- Optimize Direct Query models with table-level storage; and
- Create and manage aggregations.
In summary, Power BI is the modern graphical visualization tool with ease of access and sharing provision. We in the L&W iGaming BI Team are specialized in bringing data to life by migrating from SSRS to Power BI to help our customers, operators and all teams in the business make the best data-led decisions they can. Connect with us for more details.
The opinions expressed in this blog post are strictly those of the author in their personal capacity. They do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of Light & Wonder or of its employees.
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