Exasol
Power BI is a powerful business intelligence tool that has been gaining popularity among data analysts and organizations looking to gain insights into their data. One of the key features of Power BI is its ability to connect to a wide variety of data sources. In this article, we will explore how to use the Power Query M language to connect to an Exasol data source from inside Power BI.
What is Exasol?
Exasol is a high-performance, in-memory, columnar analytical database that allows for fast data processing and analytics. It is capable of handling large amounts of data and can be used to support a wide range of use cases, from real-time analytics to data warehousing. Exasol is often used in conjunction with other data sources and applications, making it a valuable addition to any data analyst’s toolkit.
Connecting to Exasol from Power BI
To connect to an Exasol data source from inside Power BI, we will need to use the Power Query M language. Power Query M is a functional language that is used to perform data transformations and queries in Power Query. It is a powerful tool that allows us to manipulate data in a variety of ways.
To get started, we will need to open Power BI and select “Get Data” from the Home tab. From there, we will select “Exasol” from the list of available data sources. If Exasol is not listed, we can select “Other” and then search for Exasol in the search bar.
Once we have selected Exasol, we will be prompted to enter the connection information, including the server name, port number, username, and password. We will also need to select the specific database we want to connect to. Once we have entered all the required information, we can click “Connect” to establish the connection.
Using the Power Query M Language to Query Exasol
With the connection established, we can now use the Power Query M language to query the Exasol data source. To do this, we will need to create a new query in Power Query by selecting “New Query” from the Home tab. From there, we can select “Exasol” as the data source and enter the connection information.
Once we have established the connection, we can begin building our query. The Power Query M language uses a simple syntax that is easy to learn. To retrieve data from a table, we can use the following syntax:
Exasol.Database(“server_name”, port_number, [Query=”SELECT FROM table_name”])[Data]
This will return all the data in the specified table. We can also filter the data by adding a WHERE clause to the query:
Exasol.Database(“server_name”, port_number, [Query=”SELECT FROM table_name WHERE column_name = ‘value'”])[Data]
We can also group and aggregate data using the GROUP BY and HAVING clauses:
Exasol.Database(“server_name”, port_number, [Query=”SELECT column_name, COUNT() FROM table_name GROUP BY column_name HAVING COUNT() > 10″])[Data]
These are just a few examples of the many ways we can use the Power Query M language to query an Exasol data source.
Conclusion
In this article, we have explored how to use the Power Query M language to connect to an Exasol data source from inside Power BI. We have seen how to establish a connection, retrieve data from a table, filter the data, and group and aggregate the data. By using the Power Query M language, we can perform complex data transformations and queries that would be difficult or impossible to do using traditional SQL queries.
