📄️ Checklist for Getting Started
1. Get your Tenant: Provide your Microsoft Entra Tenant ID to the VDP team. Your Virtual Data Platform tenant is initially setup by our team.
📄️ Initial Technical Setup
The following section will guide you through the setup steps of Virtual Data Platform (VDP) and will assist you in getting started. As VDP is a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution hosted in Microsoft Azure, no software installation for the platform itself is required. Every user with an appropriate license can access the services of Virtual Data Platform. The first step is to obtain a Virtual Data Platform tenant. Afterwards, licenses can be ordered and assigned to your users.
📄️ Install and Run an Agent
The Agent is a core component of the platform and enables cross-network communication between Source Systems and Virtual Data Platform. The following guides you quickly through the required steps to install and run an instance of an Agent. For a quick and proof-of-concept (PoC) like start, we recommend installing the agent as a Windows service on a local PC. For more conceptional details about the Agent please refer to the Agent section. For a more practical guide about how to install, run and update Agents, please refer to the section in the Portal where all of these tasks can be done.
📄️ Configure the First Function
The following, we describe the first steps in order to get data into an application, in this example we focus on Microsoft Excel. Therefore, we need a Source System where the data is located and a Function which defines the kind of retrival. In this example, the Function should enable you to download the German gross domestic product (GDP) from the Bundesbank data base, which is publically available.
📄️ Get Data into Excel
The Virtual Data Platform Office Add-In enables you to retrieve data via Virtual Data Platform and interact with it in Excel.
📄️ Create and Use a Model
In the following, we describe the first steps in order to create and configure a Model for virtually transforming the data of the GDP function we have created in the previous chapters of this section.
📄️ Get Data into Power BI (BETA)
Microsoft Power BI is a data visualization tool with a focus on business intelligence. Virtual Data Platform integrates into Power BI as a SQL Server and thereby enables full functionality of Power BI. Data can be loaded fully virtually, such that the source systems keep full control over authorization and permissions. Using Direct Query is highly recommended to manage and keep control over the data and its access where it should be implemented: in the source system.