Working with NoSQL — Visualizing using PowerBI

Visualization tools such as PowerBI are very easy to work with and can be used to create stunning reports, but are mostly used with structured databases. However, they can perform the same functionality even with NoSQL databases, which is what I felt needs to be written down somewhere on the internet and am going to cover in this short tutorial. I'm going to stick to MongoDB as it is the most popular NoSQL implementation. Make sure to get its connector here.

Let’s get started!

• In a command prompt window, start mongo, which is in the bin folder for the Server. Hitting show dbs should give you a list of databases

• Next, start mongosqld, which should give you an IP address and port number

IP and port number highlighted in red

• Go to ODBC Data Sources Administratorin your Windows start menu and create a new System DSN
  - Use the MongoDB Unicode Driver
  - Provide a Data Source Name to identify
  - Set the IP and port number the same as in the previous step
  - Select the database from the dropdown. If not, just enter the name of your DB

• Use the following code snippet in mongoto create a user. Change credentials as required.

db.createUser({
 user: “user”,
 pwd: “123”,
 roles:[{role:”readWrite”,db: “test”}]
})

• Open PowerBI and click the Get Data option. Select ODBC from the search and connect. Select the Data Source from the dropdown and click OK.

• Use the same credentials which you did while creating the user.

Strong passwords, always!

• You should now see your DB. Select the appropriate documents(tables) for visualization

Happy Visualizing!

Many thanks to this video for finally showing me how it is done.