We all love interactive experiences – and what better way to visualize change than to see it in Power BI? Streaming Datasets are part of the Power BI service that you can continually feed data into and watch your charts respond to the data changes. Greg will walk through the basics of setting up a real-time dashboard in addition to a real-world scenario of viewing the current demand for electricity for the western interconnection. This will be a great opportunity to see this feature in action.

1. Power BI
Streaming Datasets
Greg McMurray
San Diego BI Users Group, April 2018

2. Greg McMurray
 Senior Software Engineer at WECC
 Founder of Aritus Computer Services - 19 years
 Experience in Aerospace, Branding & Marketing, Software, Healthcare, Energy
 Active in many user groups and communities
 Find me online
 @goyuix
 https://www.linkedin.com/in/goyuix
 https://stackoverflow.com/cv/goyuix - top 3% of users

3. 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
 We work with SDGE: San Diego Gas & Electric

4. What We Will Cover
 Streaming datasets in Power BI
 Associated visualizations for streaming datasets
 PowerShell scripts to push data to the service
 Issues to watch out for
 Discussion around potential uses

5. Power BI Real-time Streaming Datasets

6. Power BI 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 – 1GB limit Pro / 10GB Premium
 Important Note: Dashboards auto-refresh / Reports require refresh

7. Example: Current Load on Western Interconnection

8. Create 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

9. 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 } ]

10. Demo: Sending Random Numbers

11. Some Gotchas
 Can’t open / use with Power BI Desktop
 Dashboards auto-refresh to show latest data but…
 Reports need to be manually refreshed
 You can do this through the API as well
 https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/announcing-data-refresh-apis-in-the-power-bi-
service/
 Streaming charts are touchy – you will break them

12. Discussion: What are good examples?
 Some common examples:
 Bulk Electric System (of course!)
 Temperature
 San Diego: Traffic, Water, Tides, Fires, Park Attendance, Gas Prices, ???
 What do these all have in common?
 Similar values
 Steady values / changes
 They also can trigger actions: Change in generation, HVAC, traffic signals

13. Wrap Up
 Do you have any questions?
 Does this spark any ideas for use for you?