In case you aren’t familiar, I would like to introduce you to the violin plot.

A violin plot is a nifty chart that shows both distribution and density of data. It’s essentially a box plot with a density plot on each side. Box plots are a common way to show variation in data, but their limitation is that you can’t see frequency of values. In other words, you can see statistics such as min, max, median, mean, or quartiles, but you can’t see the individual values nor how often they occurred.

The violin plot overcomes this limitation (by adding the density plot) without taking up much more room on the canvas.

In Power BI, you can quickly make a violin plot using a custom visual. The Violin Plot custom visual (created by Daniel Marsh-Patrick) has many useful formatting options. First, you can choose to turn off the box plot and just show the density plot. Or you can choose to trade the box plot for a barcode plot.

Formatting the Violin Plot

There are several sections of formatting for this visual. I’ll call out a few important options here. First, the Violin Options allow you to change the following settings related to the density plot portion of the violin plot.

Inner padding controls the space between each violin. Stroke width changes the width of the outline of the density plot. The sampling resolution controls the detail in the outline of the density plot. Check out Wikipedia to learn more about the kernel density estimation options.

The Sorting section allows you to choose the display order of the plots. In the example above, the sort order is set to sort by category. You can then choose whether the items should be sorted ascending or descending.

Next you can choose the color and transparency of your density plot. You have the ability to choose a different color for each plot (violin), but please don’t unless you have a good reason to do so.

The Combo Plot section controls the look of the bar code plot or box plot. Inner padding determines the width of the plot. Stroke width controls the width of the individual lines in the bar code plot, or the outline and whiskers in the box plot. You can change the box or bar color in this section. For the barcode plot, you can choose whether you would like to show the first and third quartiles and the median the color, line thickness, and line style of their markers.

Also make sure to check out the Tooltip section. It allows you to show various statistics in the tooltip without having to calculate them in DAX or show them elsewhere in the visual.

Violin Plot Custom Visual Issues & Limitations

This is a well designed custom visual, but there are a couple of small things I hope will be enhanced in the future.

1. The mean and standard deviation in the tooltip are not rounded to a reasonable amount of digits after the decimal.
2. The visual does not seem to respond to the Show Data keyboard command that places data in a screen reader friendly table.

As always, make sure to read the fine print about what each custom visual is allowed to do. Make sure you understand the permissions you are granting and that you and your organization are ok with them. For example, I used public weather data in my violin plot, so I had no concerns about sending the data over the internet. I would be more cautious if I were dealing with something more sensitive like patient data in a hospital.

Introducing the Violin Plot to Your Users

I think violin plots (especially the flavor with the bar code plot) are fairly easy to read once you have seen one, but many people may not be familiar with them. In my weather example above, I made an extra legend to help explain what the various colors of lines mean.

Another thing you might consider is adding an explainer on how to read the chart. I used a violin plot with a coworker who does not nerd out on data viz to show query costs from queries executed in SQL Server, and I added an image that explains how to read the chart.

After all, we use data visualization to analyze and present data effectively. If our users don’t understand it, we aren’t doing our job well.

Have you used the violin plot in Power BI? Leave me a comment about what kind of data you used it with and how you liked the resulting visual.

It’s not always obvious when you need a data gateway in Azure, and not all gateways are labeled as such. So I thought I would walk through various applications that act as a data gateway and discuss when, where, and how many are needed.

Note: I’m ignoring VPN gateways and application gateways for the rest of this post. You could set up a VPN gateway to get rid of some of the data gateways, but I’m assuming your networking/VPN situation is fixed at this point and working from there. This is a common case in my experience as many organizations are not ready to jump into Express Route when first planning their BI architecture.

Let’s start with what services may require you to use a data gateway.

You will need a data gateway when you are using Power BI, Azure Analysis Services, PowerApps, Microsoft Flow, Azure Logic Apps, Azure Data Factory, or Azure ML with a data source/destination that is in a private network that isn’t connected to your Azure subscription with a VPN gateway. Note that a private network includes on-premises data sources and Azure Virtual Machines as well as Azure SQL Databases and Azure SQL Data Warehouses that require use of VNet service endpoints rather than public endpoints.  

Luckily, many of these services can use the same data gateway. Power BI, Azure Analysis Services, PowerApps, Microsoft Flow, and Logic Apps all use the On Premises Data Gateway. Azure Data Factory (V1 and V2) and Azure Machine Learning Studio use the Data Factory Self-Hosted Integration Runtime.

On Premises Data Gateway (Power BI et al.)

If you are using one or more of the following:

• Power BI
• Azure Analysis Services
• PowerApps
• Microsoft Flow
• Logic Apps

and you have a data source in a private network, you need at least one gateway. But there are a few considerations that might cause you to set up more gateways.

1. Your services must be in the same region to use the same gateway. This means that your Power BI/Office 365 region and Azure region for your Azure Analysis Services resource must match for them to all use one gateway.  If you have resources in different regions, you will need one gateway per region.
2. You may want high availability for your gateway. You can create high availability clusters so when one gateway is down, traffic is rerouted to another available gateway in the cluster.
3. You may want to segment traffic to ensure the necessary resources for certain ad hoc live/direct queries or scheduled refreshes. If your usage and refresh patterns warrant it, you may want to set up one gateway for scheduled refreshes and one gateway for live/direct queries back to any on-premises data sources. Or you might make sure live/direct queries for two different high-traffic models go through different gateways so as not to block each other. This isn’t always warranted, but it can be a good strategy.

Data Factory Self-hosted Integration Runtime

If you are using Azure Data Factory (V1 or V2) or Azure ML with a data source in a private network, you will need at least one gateway. But that gateway is called a Self-hosted Integration Runtime (IR).

Self-hosted IRs can be shared across data factories in the same Azure Active Directory tenant. They can be associated with up to four machines to scale out or provide higher availability. So while you may only need one node, you might want a second so that your IR is not the single point of failure.

Or you may want multiple IRs to boost throughput of copy activities. For instance, copying from an on-premises file server with one IR node is about 195 Megabytes per second (MB/s). But with 4 IR nodes, it can be as fast as 505 MB/s.

Factors that Affect the Number of Data Gateways Needed

The main factors determining the number of gateways you need are:

1. Number of data sources in private networks (including Azure VNets)
2. Location of services in Azure and O365 (number of regions and tenants)
3. Desire for high availability
4. Desire for increased throughput or segmented traffic

If you are importing your data to Azure and using an Azure SQL DB with no VNet as the source for your Power BI model, you won’t need an On Premises Data Gateway. If you used Data Factory to copy your data from an on-premises SQL Server to Azure Data Lake and then Azure SQL DB, you need a Self-Hosted Integration Runtime.

If all your source data is already in Azure, and your source for Power BI or Azure Analysis Services is Azure SQL DW on a VNet, you will need at least one On-Premises Data Gateway.

If you import a lot of data to Azure every day using Data Factory, and you land that data to Azure SQL DW on a VNet, then use Azure Analysis Services as the data source for Power BI reports, you might want a self-hosted integration runtime with a few nodes and a couple of on-premises gateways clustered for high availability.

Have a Plan For Your Gateways

The gateways/integration runtimes are not hard to install. They are just often not considered, and projects get stalled waiting until a machine is provisioned to install them on. And many people forget to plan for high availability in their gateways. Make sure you have the right number of gateways and IR nodes to get your desired features and connectivity. You can add gateways/nodes later, but you don’t want to get caught with no high availability when it really matters.

I’m honored to have one of my PASS Summit sessions chosen to be part of the PASS Data Expert Series on February 7. PASS has curated the top-rated, most impactful sessions from PASS Summit 2018 for a day of solutions and best practices to help keep you at the top of your field. There are three tracks: Analytics, Data Management, and Architecture. My session is in the Analytics track along with some other great sessions from Alberto Ferrari, Jen Underwood, Carlos Bossy, Matt How, and Richard Campbell.

The video for my session, titled “Do Your Data Visualizations Need a Makeover?”, starts at 16:00 UTC (9 AM MT). I’ll be online in the webinar for live Q&A and chat related to the session.

I hope you’ll register and chat with me about data visualizations in need of a makeover on February 7.