[{"id":2930,"date":"2015-10-17T03:35:48","date_gmt":"2015-10-17T03:35:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/digitalborn.org\/?p=2930"},"modified":"2017-10-28T16:05:03","modified_gmt":"2017-10-28T21:05:03","slug":"connect-blackboard-asr-to-power-bi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/digitalborn.org\/connect-blackboard-asr-to-power-bi\/","title":{"rendered":"Blackboard Data: Connect Blackboard Advanced System Reporting to Power BI"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Recently I was asked to provide business analysts with a regularly refreshed feed of Blackboard data from Blackboard&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/library.blackboard.com\/docs\/cp\/learning_system\/release6\/administrator\/advanced_system_reporting.htm\" target=\"_blank\">Advanced System Reporting (ASR)<\/a>. The goal was to give analysts an updated set of data points that enabled quick reporting and visualization.<\/p>\n<p>Blackboard ASR is a statistics database that gives system administrators access to system-level data. <a href=\"https:\/\/powerbi.microsoft.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">Microsoft Power BI<\/a> is a <img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft size-medium wp-image-2937\" src=\"http:\/\/digitalborn.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/Screen-Shot-2015-10-16-at-11.42.58-PM-300x264.png\" alt=\"Course Availability Blackboard Power BI\" width=\"300\" height=\"264\" srcset=\"https:\/\/digitalborn.wpenginepowered.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/Screen-Shot-2015-10-16-at-11.42.58-PM-300x264.png 300w, https:\/\/digitalborn.wpenginepowered.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/Screen-Shot-2015-10-16-at-11.42.58-PM.png 520w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/>business intelligence\u00a0tool that allows regular analysts to quickly put together reports and dashboards. The combination gave analysts the ability to develop and share reports with regularly refreshed data across the organization. A simple example would be a bar chart that shows courses available:<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>While it&#8217;s straightforward to connect Blackboard ASR to a SQL client (Blackboard recommends Dreamcoder), pulling this data into a business intelligence tool was much more challenging since documentation on the topic is sparse. After spending several hours running into dead ends, I successfully connected Blackboard ASR to Power BI. Hopefully these instructions save you time:<\/p>\n<h3>How to Connect to Blackboard Data<\/h3>\n<p>1. Open Power BI Desktop<br \/>\n2. Click on Get Data -&gt; Oracle\u2028 Database<br \/>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/digitalborn.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/Screen-Shot-2015-10-16-at-11.17.16-PM.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft size-large wp-image-2931\" src=\"http:\/\/digitalborn.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/Screen-Shot-2015-10-16-at-11.17.16-PM-968x1024.png\" alt=\"Power BI Oracle Database\" width=\"960\" height=\"1016\" srcset=\"https:\/\/digitalborn.wpenginepowered.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/Screen-Shot-2015-10-16-at-11.17.16-PM-968x1024.png 968w, https:\/\/digitalborn.wpenginepowered.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/Screen-Shot-2015-10-16-at-11.17.16-PM-284x300.png 284w, https:\/\/digitalborn.wpenginepowered.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/Screen-Shot-2015-10-16-at-11.17.16-PM-645x682.png 645w, https:\/\/digitalborn.wpenginepowered.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/Screen-Shot-2015-10-16-at-11.17.16-PM-662x700.png 662w, https:\/\/digitalborn.wpenginepowered.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/Screen-Shot-2015-10-16-at-11.17.16-PM.png 1218w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 960px) 100vw, 960px\" \/><\/a><br \/>\n3. In the Server field enter the quick connect information in this format<br \/>\n<strong>(host name):(port number)\/(service name)<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>For\u00a0example<br \/>\n<em>55.555.555.555:10053\/ORACLE<\/em><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/digitalborn.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/Screen-Shot-2015-10-16-at-11.19.09-PM.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft size-large wp-image-2932\" src=\"http:\/\/digitalborn.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/Screen-Shot-2015-10-16-at-11.19.09-PM-1024x385.png\" alt=\"Server connection Power BI Oracle\" width=\"960\" height=\"361\" srcset=\"https:\/\/digitalborn.wpenginepowered.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/Screen-Shot-2015-10-16-at-11.19.09-PM-1024x385.png 1024w, https:\/\/digitalborn.wpenginepowered.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/Screen-Shot-2015-10-16-at-11.19.09-PM-300x113.png 300w, https:\/\/digitalborn.wpenginepowered.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/Screen-Shot-2015-10-16-at-11.19.09-PM-645x242.png 645w, https:\/\/digitalborn.wpenginepowered.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/Screen-Shot-2015-10-16-at-11.19.09-PM-662x249.png 662w, https:\/\/digitalborn.wpenginepowered.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/Screen-Shot-2015-10-16-at-11.19.09-PM.png 1426w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 960px) 100vw, 960px\" \/><\/a><br \/>\nYou can read more on this string <a href=\"http:\/\/www.powerpivotpro.com\/2015\/07\/connecting-to-an-oracle-database-from-power-pivot\/\" target=\"_blank\">here<\/a><\/p>\n<p>4. Next enter the database username and password provided by Blackboard<\/p>\n<p>Once you have authenticated using the database credentials provided by Blackboard, you will select the tables to load into Power BI.<\/p>\n<p>Congratulations, you&#8217;re now ready to create reports and dashboards the easy way.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Recently I was asked to provide business analysts with a regularly refreshed feed of Blackboard data from Blackboard&#8217;s Advanced System Reporting (ASR). The goal was to give analysts an updated set of data points that enabled quick reporting and visualization. Blackboard ASR is a statistics database that gives system administrators access to system-level data. Microsoft [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":2933,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[114],"tags":[140,139,135,138,136,137,134,142,141],"class_list":["post-2930","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-tech-tips","tag-advanced","tag-asr","tag-bi","tag-blackboard","tag-business","tag-intelligence","tag-power-bi","tag-reporting","tag-system"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitalborn.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2930","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitalborn.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitalborn.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitalborn.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitalborn.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2930"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/digitalborn.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2930\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitalborn.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2933"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitalborn.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2930"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitalborn.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2930"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitalborn.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2930"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}]