Portfolio Example 1: Crime Data LA
I recently started pulling data from data.gov to demonstrate some of my capabilities as a Power BI Data Analyst. Here is the first of (hopefully) many Power BI reports that provide a good showcase of my abilities and what I love to do – work with data!
Still a work in progress – unfortunately, the Azure map doesn’t work as the visual is no longer in Preview. Will replace with something that provides more value to a potential end user.
I know it doesn’t look like much, but I’ll dive into some of the unseen functionality behind the scenes and hopefully that will be more impressive…
Data Modeling
While the main table of data is pulled as is from data.gov, I do add a custom Date table and define specific date-related columns as needed in order to render the month/year data in the charts.
When using multiple dates joined to the date table, only one relationship can be active at a time, so within the measure I will modify the active relationship using USERELATIONSHIP(). Normally, this will be used within the CALCULATE() function.
I try follow best practice guidelines promoted by experts such as SQLBI.com and others to use explicit measures exclusively.
Data Extraction (ETL Process)
Data is pulled from data.gov set up as a daily refresh (for now), though it looks like the data only updates every couple of weeks. I will tune down the refresh to match the frequency of updates. This data comes over as a JSON file that I parse and use Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) processes to clean.
The ETL is handled in the Dataflow I created so that I could potentially refer to this data in multiple reports (or Excel files) without having to go through the same ETL processes again and again.
Data Visualization
The Area slicer not only filters the data (as expected) but by using the custom label functionality it changes the title (more easily demonstrated with only 1 area selected).
I added a Field Parameter for the ‘Visual Filter’ selector to update the visuals with either the year or area data.
Anyway, just a few simple examples of what I can do within Power BI.