Power BI App Over TigerGraph Database

Patient Distribution Analysis
Patient Trend Analysis

Inspiration

Tiger Graph Database together with Vertices, Edges and Attributes becomes a rich source of data. But, I couldn't find any way to explore this data for analysis using conventional BI tool. Therefore, the main inspiration was to get required chunk of data from Graph Database and pulling it into BI tool for data analysis.

What it does

This Power BI application pulls a query data using REST API endpoints from TigerGraph cloud. The pulled data is generally not directly into a format suitable for running analytics on Power BI. However, this pulled data can be transformed into suitable format by applying a power query skills. This application just shows one such example. It can serve as a template or sample for BI developer and Analyst, thereby empowering them with a way to perform analytics over portion of a Graph Database without GSQL.

How I built it

TigerGraph Cloud has a base of Covid-19 Analysis. This base is used to create a solution. In GraphStudio, data is loaded in the solution and GSQL query is performed only to get Patients data. Installed query has a query endpoint which can be used for external application (which is Power BI here). Also, authentication is taken care of by generating a token with the help of Secret creation at Admin User Management portal. Once, endpoint and authorization credentials are ready, then it is all about connecting using Power BI Web Connector. Data received from connection is transformed to conventional table format so that Power BI visualization be created. Note that these visualizations are first step towards an effective data analysis and insight study.

Challenges I ran into

Had to learn about TigerGraph REST API, authorization and a basic GSQL.
Connecting a Power BI through a web connector demanded proper mapping of authorization credentials.It took some time to understand.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I think this app was a first step towards establishing a talk between Power BI and TigerGraph.

What I learned

TigerGraph Cloud, TigerGraph GraphStudio, GSQL Basics and overall how TigerGraph Database works.

What's next for Power BI App Over TigerGraph Database

Like I said earlier, this app is a first step towards establishing a talk between Power BI and TigerGraph. So far, it is selective and uni-directional. The next big step should be establishing a smooth both way talk between Power BI and TigerGraph. And the only possible way to do this will be creating a Custom Connector in Power BI for TigerGraph.