Data is flowing like never before, but the technical entirety of integrating this data from different, often incompatible sources poses a far greater barrier. Data integration is the technical and business process of combining data from various sources into a single, unified view. With all of your data in one location (data warehouse), you make your data more valuable for your business. 

In this article, I will discuss how you can use Panoply to help your organization as a data warehouse and how you can get insight from your data using its Power BI integration. 

Prerequisites

You will need the following:

• Power BI Desktop. You can download it from Powerbi.microsoft.com
• A Panoply account. You can create one via their sign-up page.
• A Shopify store. You can create one via their sign-up page.

What’s Panoply and how can it help you?

Panoply is a cloud data warehouse platform that allows and makes it easy for you to store, access, and integrate your data with any BI and analytics tools. In simpler terms, Panoply is that central repository for all your business’s data. 

Panoply not only gives you a data warehouse that doesn’t require pipeline maintenance or costly data engineering, but it also takes care of infrastructure management and code-free data integrations for seamless syncing.

What’s Power BI and How can it help you?

Power BI’s data integration power comes from its ability to quickly connect to numerous data sources and Microsoft’s Power Platform. Power BI is a user-friendly application that helps you connect, transform, clean, create data models, structure, and visualize your data. The perks of Power BI include real-time stream analytics with interactive UI/UX elements for your data visualization.

To put it another way, Power BI is a tool that can help you take data analysis and visualization to the next level. Thus, incorporating a well-designed data warehouse application with a robust BI tool like Power BI will give you a good return on your investment.

Importing your data into your Panoply data warehouse

Panoply makes it simple to connect to a variety of data sources. In this tutorial, we’ll learn how to import data from Shopify into Panoply and then use the Panoply BI integration to analyze the data in Power BI efficiently.

The data source: Shopify

Shopify is a full-featured Software as a Service (SaaS) eCommerce platform that makes it easy to advertise, sell, and buy products and services. With Shopify, you can host your online store and manage your business. 

I would be populating my Shopify store with data from this repository. 

Get data from Shopify into your Panoply data warehouse

Getting data from Shopify into your Panoply data warehouse will give you a more comprehensive view of your store. So let’s follow these steps.

Step One

After you’ve created your Panoply account, go to the upper pane and click data source, then click on add data source.

Step Two

Search for “Shopify” and click on the Shopify icon once you see it.

Step Three

You’ll need to provide your store name. For example, the URL of my store is https://panoplytest.myshopify.com/admin. Thus, my store name is “panoplytest.” If this is the first time, you will need to grant and provide credentials to access the store.

Step Four

Next, you select all the data you want to pull into Panoply by ticking the boxes. For the tutorial, I would go with Select all. You can also specify advanced option preferences by clicking on the Advanced tab.

Step Five

After choosing the data table you want, click on Save Changes to save all your changes, followed by Collect to start pulling your data into Panoply.

Step Six

Woo-hoo! That’s all. Your data has been collected successfully.

You can also schedule collections for your data by clicking on Schedule collections. 

We’ll look at Panoply’s BI integration and see how we can leverage Power BI to analyze Shopify data in the next session.

How to do it: Getting insights into your Panoply data warehouse with Power BI

Panoply stores your data in the cloud in analysis-ready tables and makes it simple to link it to BI tools such as Power BI. In this session, I will walk you through how you can accomplish this:

Step One

Click on data source to go back to your data source.  Next, click on BI connection. 

Step Two

Scroll down and click Power BI. This will take you to the documentation. Panoply builds your connection on either Amazon Redshift or Google BigQuery. You will see details on where Panoply built yours in the connection details. From the image above, you can see that our is on Google BigQuery. 

Step Three

Open your PowerBI Desktop. Click on Get Data or Get data from another source.

Step Four

Search for “Google BigQuery” and click on Connect.

Step Five

You will be redirected to a Google sign-in page upon clicking on Connect. Use the user details Panoply generated for you; mine is benny@dwh-panoply.io, and the password is the same as your Panoply account password. Unfortunately, I can’t tell you mine 😄. 

Step Six

You will also need to grant Power BI authorization to access your Google Account. Click on Allow to do this.

Step seven

You will be taken back to Power BI desktop. The Navigator will show you all the tables in your Google Big Query. Look for the project name; mine was “panoply-646-c5f5af66abf1”. Under your project, you will find all the tables you imported from Shopify.

You’ve successfully established the connection between PowerBI and your BigQuery data warehouse. You can now transform your data and start the data analysis process just by clicking on Transform data.

Conclusion

Panoply’s ability to seamlessly capture and store data from multiple sources, combined with Power BI’s great visualization and robust data analysis capabilities, allows your company to reap the full benefits of your business data. 

Ready to give it a shot? Set up a call with us at or visit UrBizEdge.com. Give it a try today!