Rock U - Reporting - BI Overview

Transcribed Video Content

Okay. So let's start with an overview of the business intelligence tools within Rock. Now the goal of these tools is really to take all this data, all this raw data within Rock and bring it up and make it more presentable. And so what we wanna do is provide you with a set of dashboards, set of reports, and really a capability of taking all of this raw data and making it information, making it something that you can take action on and something that you can move forward in making decisions with. Now, with a transactional system Rock, it's really based upon a database full of all of these tables. And there's lots of tables. And this is each one of these tables is needed and necessary. It's it's a way of keeping sure making sure that the data is consistent and it's tracked correctly. Now, this really isn't the exact table structure within Rock. It's just an example. But as you can see, there's just lots and lots of tables. And this is just a small part of how many tables there are within Rock. Now, the problem with this is it's very hard to report off of. There's a lot of different tables you have to join to and filter on, and that can be very confusing and very hard. So what we've done is we've created a second set of tables, a business intelligence structure. And so what we've done is we've really kind of simplified the data structure. We've put in a technical term would be called denormalized it. And we do this because it makes it a lot easier to build reports from. It makes a lot easier to do filtering and it's actually a lot faster. And so speed is one of the features that comes from this. And so as you'll see a lot of these tools that we'll be using with the BI tool set within Rock are really gonna be very quick. They're gonna power through a ton of data very quickly. And so speed is a great feature of that. And so much so that you might choose to start writing some of your custom SQL if you do that against these tables. Now, that does come with a limitation and that is that these tables that we're gonna be querying from are not kept up to date. Okay? So they're not instantaneously updated as the data changes within Rock. As you'll learn about a little bit later, there's a a job within Rock that's gonna keep these tables up to date. So it's up to you to determine how often you wanna update these tables, , at least once a day. But you could actually run them more often. And there's a lot of customization you can do with that job to make that fit your needs. Okay. So it's very very very important that you understand that the the data that you're gonna be accessing through the BI tools is not instantaneously. It's not up to a second in terms of its freshness. You have to run this job to continually update them. Okay. So the tool set within Rock, what we call BI, is platform agnostic. That means that we're not really limiting you to a specific tool. That said, we want to make sure that we can give you a jump start that we can kinda help coach you along, in a tool set. And so we, have chosen to to select the Microsoft Power BI platform, as a reporting, dashboarding, tool set. You don't have to use this tool. It's definitely an option. And we'll talk a little bit more about some of the other options later. But again, we wanted to find something that we could kinda coach you along, kinda get you started with. The reason why we chose Microsoft BI is, two two two feature sets. One is it's very, very powerful. And second, it's very, very reasonably priced. And so there's nonprofit pricing, where you can get it down to about $6 per logged in user. And as you'll see, you don't really need that many logged in users. And so this is a very accessible platform and it's very powerful. Now, if we look at the full Power BI, tool set, there's a lot of different components. And I wanna kinda show you this slide just to kinda explain how it all works, how the ecosystem works within Power BI. First and foremost, we're gonna start down here. This is what is called Power BI Desktop. And so this runs on a Windows computer and it's a free application. Okay? So you can download this. You never have to pay for it. It's a lot maybe Microsoft Access and Excel put together, but it's so much easier, to make these really nice looking reports. And so what you do is you kind of use this as your authoring platform. And so you're gonna bring in your data here, you're gonna make your reports, and then what you're gonna do is you're gonna you're gonna optionally publish them up to the cloud. Okay? And they make it really easy. You just go out here and you make a a cloud account. This is where you need to start paying. So for each person who logs into this cloud account, it's about $6 per user per month. And so you're gonna publish your data and your reports up to this cloud. And now this is all web based. So anybody can actually view this who has the login, that you provide or you're you're putting another account into this, master organization account that you create. And so that's a great way of sharing, your reports. You can also bring these reports down back into Rock. Okay. So we have and you'll see it a little bit later, we have a report viewer that you can actually embed it inside of of your Rock instance. And so that's really nice because you don't need to log in to Power BI. You can just log in to Rock and see this data, here. So again, this is another way where you don't have to really buy a lot of these seats if you can embed it this way. Now, as I mentioned, when you come from the from the desktop, when you publish into the cloud, you're publishing your data and you're publishing your formatted reports. Now, that's kind of a pain because you always have to be out there pushing, , update, to push your your updated data into the cloud. So Power BI creates this what's what's called an enterprise gateway, which you install on your Rock server and it'll push the data into the cloud for you. Okay. And the the the default on that is to push it once a day. But you can actually configure it to push it four to six times a day if you'd . So these are the major components but they also provide mobile apps. So for in each app store, can download these mobile apps so that you can engage with these reports and and interact with them, from a mobile, device. And so that's, another capability, and these connect right into the cloud. So that's the Power BI, ecosystem. But again, we're not limiting you. These tools that we're that we've created, these data views and models that we've created, they're they're usable by any product. And so some of you might be more interested in in doing that with Tableau. So Tableau is a very powerful platform also. In fact, it's probably even more powerful than Power BI, but that power comes at a cost. And so they also have a desktop component that you can use and then they also have a a cloud environment that you can you can use also. So again, the the point of this slide is really just to tell you that you're not limited in Power BI. You can basically use any tools that you want. You can even write your own reports against the models that we create. Now, our goal with these videos is not to make you expert or a Power BI expert. We're just trying to give you a taste for what's possible. And if you want to dig a little deeper, we highly encourage you, to get more training on that. And one of the ways you can get more training is from a site called Pluralsight. So Pluralsight specializes in technical training and what's really great about this is it's a full course. So you can take a couple hours worth of training and it's all structured just to to coach you along and to and to walk you through from easy to hard within Power BI. And so if you go out to rockrms.com/plural site, we have quite a few links there that you can kinda dig deeper into different topics that might be relevant to your Rock adventure. And so this is one example. There there's a when it comes to Power BI too, there's also quite a few YouTube videos you can watch. Those are great. There's some really fantastic YouTube videos. What I would say though, what's difference between those YouTube videos and this Pluralsight is Pluralsight's gonna give you a really nicely developed course. So there's over three hours of content and it's all, , structured to kind of lead you through. The YouTube videos are great on single topics, but they they're really not a great one out there that kind of walks you through from beginning to end on how to use, Power BI. So if you want to dig deeper, that's a great resource. And that's just an overview and now we're gonna dig deeper into each of the different topics, within the BI tool set within Rock.