Alan Slater

Want to push data directly to the cloud using the Power BI API but not sure where to start? Our handy guide will help you get the basics under your belt.

Power BI can connect to a wide variety of systems to collect data to drive reports and dashboards. But what if we want to consolidate data from multiple locations, such as a large number of dynamically created SharePoint lists, into a single dataset?

You might be tempted to first consolidate this data into a location such as Azure SQL, before connecting to that SQL database from Power BI. However, this isn’t actually necessary, as we can use Power BI’s own API to create a dataset into which we can push data directly, removing the need for a separate database.

This blog post outlines the steps involved in using the Power BI API to manage data. These are:

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An introduction to how Azure’s Shared Access Signatures let web apps share the load of downloading large files.

I recently found a subtle problem in a third-party Azure utility – it was giving access to rather more data than I had expected!

Shared Access Signatures

First a bit of background. Azure Storage has a powerful mechanism for securing access by end users to resources, called Shared Access Signatures (SAS). A common scenario is to use it to let end users directly download files from Azure Blob Storage, without having to go through an associated application.

Imagine that Alice and Bob are both using an Azure web application that stores large data files or videos. These files are private, so we don’t want Alice to be able to access Bob’s files and vice versa. We also don’t want anyone to be able to modify these files other than through the web application.

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