How to ask questions in Power BI Q&A that show results from multiple data sets

[zeeshanqadir]

One question around Q&A in Power BI around ‘how to ask Q&A questions in Power BI that show results from multiple data sets’.

I have two ‘pushStreaming’ data sets in Power BI e.g. one is for Orders and another is of Payments. I have a dashboard with Q&A enabled, which has table and pie charts from reports built from the two respective data sets. That means that I can ask questions in natural language about Orders in Orders data set or for Payments in Payments data set on that dashboard. So, when I ask questions, it will either answer that through the Orders data set OR through the Payments data set.

Please note that my payment data set has a correlation ID as well, that’s called OrderID so that I can potentially correlate the information across the two data sets and show all orders with a specific payment status.

However I am not able to let Power BI Q&A work in a way that it combines the data from both the data sets, as it just tries to stick to either of the two data sets as the source for it’s query response.

The section “Combine results from more than one data set” at https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/powerbi-service-q-and-a-tips/#combine-results-from... suggests that it’s possible to combine the results from two data sets in Q&A.

Any help / pointers on how to make Q&A to combine the results from two data sets would be great.

[v-jiascu-msft]

Hi @zeeshanqadir,

1. What are your two datasets exactly? Push dataset and Streaming dataset are two different types of real-time dataset. If they are both Push dataset, Q&A is supported. Because Streaming doesn't have a underlying dataset, Q&A isn't supported.

2. Can you see them from prompts of Q&A?

The part in blue rectangle is guidance. The parts in red rectangle are datasets.

Best Regards!

Dale

[zeeshanqadir]

Hi @v-jiascu-msft

Thanks for the response. 

The two datasets i.e. Orders & Payments are 'PushStreaming' datasets and Q&A is available on those. For 'PushStreaming' datasets, the data is stored in Power BI. These datasets are created through Power BI REST API using the Create Dataset API. The snippet of the JSON posted on that CreateDataset API to create these datasets is as below: 

 

The data is inserted as a stream into these datasets through the Power BI REST API too as I can see the data in real time reflected and showing up in the reports and dashboards as soon as the data is inserted through REST API.

Also the Q&A is available on both the data sets too, as shown in the below picture: 

When I ask questions in natural language through Q&A about the data relevant from any one of the data sets, I do get the relevant results shown up, however when I ask questions that require data from both the datasets i.e. Orders & Payments dataset, the Q&A is stikcing that to one of the two datasets and isn't able to get the data from both the datasets together. 

Any tips on how to ask questins in Power BI Q&A so that it shows results from multiple datasets.