Microsoft Big Data Solutions

Visualizing Big Data with Microsoft BI

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN IN THIS CHAPTER:

• Learning What Microsoft BI Tools Are Available for Big Data Visualizations
• Setting Up the ODBC Driver for Data Access
• Loading Data into a PowerPivot Model
• Adding Measures to a PowerPivot Model
• Creating Pivot Tables to Analyze the Data
• Using Power View to Explore Big Data
• Using Power Map for Spatial Exploration of Data

One of the most important aspects of any business intelligence (BI) solution is making sense of the data to drive intelligent decision-making processes. This usually includes creating visualizations in the form of charts, graphs, and maps that allow the user to easily spot trends and anomalies in the data. The old adage “a picture is worth a thousand words” could not be truer when it comes to data analysis.

Hadoop does not provide native reporting and visualization capabilities, but plenty of tools out there do a good job of providing data visualization. Using standard ODBC drivers, you can easily connect these tools to Hadoop, and use Hive queries to pull the data into reports and dashboards. Microsoft provides an outstanding set of tools in their self-service BI suite that make it easy to build interactive reports and dashboards. This chapter covers these various tools and how you can use them to gain insight into your Hadoop data repositories.

An Ecosystem of Tools

Microsoft provides a ...