There are a lot of tools available these days when it comes to reporting. In this book, we'll use Power BI for several reasons:
- It has a free version. We'll talk about the different versions later in this chapter.
- It can connect to a wide variety of data sources.
- There are many transformations and merges that can be applied to the data sources from it.
- It is easy to use and has a lot of visualizations available.
Power BI is not that new in the reporting world; it has been around for almost 5 years now. It has evolved since then and continues to evolve. Microsoft releases an update to Power BI monthly.
From a modern data warehouse perspective, we need a reporting tool that is flexible enough to accommodate a wide variety of users, from beginners or casual users to power users. As we will see later in this chapter, Power BI can...