Question

Data from IFSINFO to Power BI

  • 4 April 2023
  • 5 replies
  • 300 views

Userlevel 1
Badge +3

Hi Team,

We have a requirement to one of customer who is on IFS cloud 22R1 to access data from IFS (IFSINFO) to power BI.

The customer needs to create dashboards and reports in Power BI using IFS.

Regards

 

 


5 replies

Userlevel 2
Badge +4

This question is a bit open-ended. You can request/setup read-access to the back-end database and this could be used to pull data through. Alternatively you could pull the data via APIs.

There are pro’s and con’s to each approach to consider (performance & security mainly). Personally I would use the REST APIs as a best practice.

Userlevel 4
Badge +7

Hi Arif,

we have had a lot of experience in this with our customers over the years and I would always suggest extracting your data through a Datawarehouse, transform it and build star-schemas and/or Microsoft cubes (multidimentional or tabular).

Experience shows that the PowerBI User starts with relatively small “models” but quite soon is asking for more.
For example: they ask for sales reports based on 'Customer Orders' but will add data from customers and sales parts - When you extend more than 10 objects the models tend to get very complicated and start to slow to a point where it becomes a problem
Not something you want!

 

kind regards

Michael

Userlevel 1
Badge +3

Hi Arif,

we have had a lot of experience in this with our customers over the years and I would always suggest extracting your data through a Datawarehouse, transform it and build star-schemas and/or Microsoft cubes (multidimentional or tabular).

Experience shows that the PowerBI User starts with relatively small “models” but quite soon is asking for more.
For example: they ask for sales reports based on 'Customer Orders' but will add data from customers and sales parts - When you extend more than 10 objects the models tend to get very complicated and start to slow to a point where it becomes a problem
Not something you want!

 

kind regards

Michael

Thanks Michael, may i know the steps involved in setting up the connectivity between IFS on cloud with Power BI . Do i need to build a gateway ?.

Userlevel 4
Badge +7

Hi Arif,

frankly, we hadn’t a project taking data from the cloud to a BI-Server / DataWareHouse-environment so far.

I did a quick research and it looks very promising:

https://docs.ifs.com/techdocs/22r1/050_reporting/400_power_bi_int/

Be aware that this will lead to the use of Microsoft PowerBI Server!

The possible scenarios are listed here:

https://docs.ifs.com/techdocs/22r1/050_reporting/450_self_hosted_bi_int/

 

The scenario we prefer (BI infrastructure on prem),
is to use Microsoft SQL Server for ETL purpose, extract raw data, transform it to star-schemas (which you can directly use e.g. with Qlick) and - if necessary - build some MS cubes (multidim and tabular), which you can easily use with PowerBI, Excel pivot and all the other BI frontend tools.

Then you CAN use the PowerBI server but it is not a MUST HAVE!

hope that helps!

 

CU

Michael

 


 

 

Userlevel 4
Badge +7

Hi there,

some more stuff.

I think you need the following:
https://www.oracle.com/webfolder/technetwork/tutorials/obe/cloud/ggcs/Connect_to_Cloud_and_Non_Cloud_DB_with_Oracle_SQL_Developer/Connect_to_Cloud_and_Non_Cloud_DB_with_Oracle_SQL_Developer.html

 

Connect to Cloud and Non Cloud DB with Oracle SQL Developer

 

When it is possible to connect to a cloud based ORACLE DB
(therefore you first have to install the ORACLE client software, perhaps some SQL tools like
the ORACLE SQL Developer) it should be easy to use PowerBI for connections directly into the ORACLE DB (even if we do not recommend it! :-) )

 

 

Reply