Power BI and Dataflows

[gmq]

Apologies if this is not the right section. I am somewhat new to this fascinating tool and still have to get around all the existing and new capabilities that keep getting released in the blink of an eye.

I would love to be able to extract from Quickbooks Commerce + Shopify + Google sheets, I am almost positive I could do the ETL process using Power Query.

To my understanding, would data flow enable me to connect to the cloud SaaS, ETL them and load to some sort of 'free' azure cloud data lake ? (we currently don't have a Data Lake / Warehouse and I could use this 'test/prototype' to showcase at least one thing that can be done with cloud storage )

To give you a little bit of background currently I got tangled in a painstaking process where I export standard reports from Quickbooks + Shopify, save them on my local drive and then the Power bi model kicks in by loading the folder, and I would very much like not only automate that, but extract data from those softwares that I am currently unable (i.e. in QBC historic inventory costs on every date)

Hope the message makes sense, and thanks everyone for making this forum great.

[QueryWhiz]

Hello, going for the PBI dataflows option would not be easy from what I see because both Quickbooks and Shopify would need to have native connectors to PBI, which I guess they don't at the moment. Using a cloud storage like Azure data lake could be useful but you'll need to make the connection from the sources to Azure to make all the ETL process in there, the thing is doing this integration would require some development on your side I guess. As a workardound, I would suggest you to use an external tool to easily export data from both Quickbooks and Shopify into Azure SQL. I've used windsor.ai to make this integration in the past as they offer both connectors

[aj1973]

Hi @gmq 

I think this link can help you answer all your questions

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/transform-model/dataflows/dataflows-introduction-self-serv...

[gmq]

Hi Amine,

thank you so much for your replay, this helps clarify a lot. But I still struggle to understand whether if I am able to host an small azure data lake storage for a few data flows using my power bi pro/premium license.

In a way that would enable me to test and showcase the whole power of cloud storing, schedule refresh, interactive power bi viz to name a few.

Would you agree that can be done ?

Thanks

[aj1973]

@gmq 

Yes I would agree, and many more things you can do with Power bi. 

Don't wait too long and start testing.

Good luck