Hi, we were wondering if anyone has experience using the GBIF API to build a dashboard in PowerBI. One of our publishers is interested in doing a real time dashboard with their data, someone from their team with experience in PowerBI tried, but failed to do so. They were using the general call for all their data and it is more than 2 million records, so maybe that is a factor.
We want to know if someone has done something similar or if there are any recommendations on how to do it, if maybe it is better to do an API download giving the volume of their data.
There are open-source alternatives to Microsoft’s Power BI (e.g. Apache Superset, Pretzel) and if all your publisher is interested in is data visualisation, there are even more open-source, free, DV dashboards. Did your publisher suggest Power BI because of that team member’s experience, or because their data was already in a Microsoft framework, e.g. Azure storage?
Thanks for your suggestions Bob. I think they want PowerBI because it is already integrated in their workflows and maybe they have a license. So they need to do it in that specific tool rather than other options.
The API is limited to 100.000 records per query, however, if the dashboard is limited to a few datasets, It’s probably more efficient to just read the datasets in directly and display from that instead of reading from the API.
As an alternative, maybe starting from the parquet dump might help?