SL Data Community November Meetup - Session 1: Streaming Analytics in Power BI Questions and Answers

SL Data Community November event concluded successfully on yesterday(29th of November) with 50+ attendees even with the bad weather condition and heavy traffic congestion. I hope everyone went home safely. 

Typically, SL Data Community meet-up is happening in every month. It includes two sessions and being treated as a common place where we can share our knowledge, experiences, and thoughts about technologies (mostly data related) which we are earning while working in the Corporate world.  

 Data Community members who were participated 

   

This time the first session was conducted by myself. The topic was Real Time Streaming Data Analytics using Microsoft Power BI

While I'm delivering my session: Stream Analytics in Power BI

In the session, I spoke regarding How to analyze streaming data using Microsoft Power BI and demonstrated it. At the end, the session was opened for the Questions and Answers. These are the questions I was asked by the audience. I thought it is better to write it up in a blog post by assuming this is going to be some common questions anyone could have regarding Power BI and other technologies. 

Q1: Can I sign-up with Microsoft Power BI Service and Use it Today?

Yes. If you have a corporate email account or if you are a university student you probably have an email account which given by your campus. That is the minimum requirement to have in order to sign up with Microsoft Power BI. Apparently, you cannot use non-corporate email accounts like Gmail, Hotmail .. etc. 

In here I assume what Power BI does is, validating the signup email based on the domain. Typically once the domain is registered for a company or an organization you are getting your email address with that domain. So Power BI can search your email domain and validate it whether it is a corporate account or not.

Once you signed up, you will be assigned to a Power BI Free license where typically you can perform all the functionalities in Pro License except for collaboration and sharing reports you created with others in your tenant.

Q2: Does Streaming Analytics functionality available with Power BI Free License?

Yes. That was my answer at the session based on what I read. But, I needed to do it practically and verify my answer. I signed up with another corporate account and by default, they assigned the account for Power BI free license. In this account, I cannot create Apps which have the control to collaborate the reports among others in the organization. Normally when we're trying to create an App Workspace while were are in the free account it will pop-up the below message. 

Basically, it asks you to move to Pro License to work with Apps. Then, let's move to the question again. "Is it possible to do streaming stuff?" I tried to add Streaming dataset with my newly created free account. Yessss ! It is possible. I’m pleased with that. Because all of you can try what I did in the demo 😊

Creating a Streaming Dataset

Adding fields to Streaming Data Set

Streaming Dataset created successfully using Free account

Q3: What are the Algorithms used in Sentiment Analysis?

I explained a small experiment I did during my session which is a sentiment analysis using Twitter feeds from Microsoft Flow and Azure Text Analytics API. Also, I explained it can be easily done without any coding involved. So, the third question from the audience was what is the technology or algorithm behind it. Essentially, if there is a comment from a customer regarding the service of the company, how Azure text API identify correctly whether the comment is positive/negative or neutral

I didn’t have a perfect answer at that time. Because I just tried out using the API and Flow and was waiting to get some free time to learn more about it.

They are using various classification techniques to generate sentiment. For the 'input classifier' includes n-grams, word embeddings, features generated from the speech tags etc. Sounds interesting? You can learn more exactly how they do in this link.

The second half of the meetup acquired by an expert in Business Intelligence and Microsoft technologies, Gogula Aryalingam who also a Microsoft MVP on Data Platform. 

He spoke regarding Speedup ETL Data Cleansing using Power Query which is related Data Warehousing and Data Integration development. 

While Gogula is delivering ETLing, ETL testing and some new tools introduced by Microsoft recently. 

There was a question and answer session at the end for the audience with give-aways. 😊