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Notebook visualization in Microsoft Fabric

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Microsoft Fabric is an integrated analytics service that accelerates time to insight across data warehouses and big data analytics systems. Data visualization in notebooks is a key component that allows you to gain insight into your data. It helps make big and small data easier for humans to understand. It also makes it easier to detect patterns, trends, and outliers in groups of data.

When you use Apache Spark in Fabric, there are various built-in options to help you visualize your data, including Fabric notebook chart options, and access to popular open-source libraries.

When using a Fabric notebook, you can turn your tabular results view into a customized chart using chart options. Here, you can visualize your data without having to write any code.

Built-in visualization command - display() function

The Fabric built-in visualization function allows you to turn Apache Spark DataFrames, Pandas DataFrames and SQL query results into rich format data visualizations.

You can use the display function on dataframes that created in PySpark and Scala on Spark DataFrames or Resilient Distributed Datasets (RDD) functions to produce the rich dataframe table view and chart view.

The output of SQL statement appears in the rendered table view by default.

Rich dataframe table view

Animated GIF of rich dataframe preview.

  1. Table view is rendered by default when using display() command.
  2. You can profile your dataframe by clicking on Inspect button. It provides the summarized data distribution and showing statistics of each column.
  3. Each card in the "Inspect" side pane maps to a column of the dataframe, you can view more details by clicking on the card or selecting a column in the table.
  4. You can view the cell details by clicking on the cell of the table. This is useful when the dataframe contains long string type of contents.
  5. You can specify the row count of the table view, the default value is 1000, Notebook support to view and profile 10000 rows of a dataframe at most.

Rich dataframe chart view

Animated GIF of chart view.

  1. Once you have a rendered table view, switch to the Chart view.

  2. Fabric notebook will automatically recommend a "Key" "Value" pair based on the target dataframe, to make the default chart significative with data insights.

  3. You can now customize your visualization by specifying the following values:

    Configuration Description
    Chart type The display function supports a wide range of chart types, including bar charts, scatter plots, line graphs, and more.
    Key Specify the range of values for the x-axis.
    Value Specify the range of values for the y-axis values.
    Series group Use this configuration to determine the groups for the aggregation.
    Aggregation Use this method to aggregate data in your visualization.

    the configurations will be auto-saved in the Notebook output content.

    Note

    By default the display(df) function will only take the first 1000 rows of the data to render the charts. Select Aggregation over all results and then select Apply to apply the chart generation from the whole semantic model. A Spark job will be triggered when the chart setting changes. Please note that it may take several minutes to complete the calculation and render the chart.

  4. When the job is complete, you can view and interact with your final visualization.

display(df) summary view

Use display(df, summary = true) to check the statistics summary of a given Apache Spark DataFrame. The summary includes the column name, column type, unique values, and missing values for each column. You can also select a specific column to see its minimum value, maximum value, mean value, and standard deviation.

Animated GIF of summary view.

displayHTML() option

Fabric notebooks support HTML graphics using the displayHTML function.

The following image is an example of creating visualizations using D3.js.

Screenshot of an example of a chart created using D3.js.

To create this visualization, run the following code.

displayHTML("""<!DOCTYPE html>
<meta charset="utf-8">

<!-- Load d3.js -->
<script src="https://d3js.org/d3.v4.js"></script>

<!-- Create a div where the graph will take place -->
<div id="my_dataviz"></div>
<script>

// set the dimensions and margins of the graph
var margin = {top: 10, right: 30, bottom: 30, left: 40},
  width = 400 - margin.left - margin.right,
  height = 400 - margin.top - margin.bottom;

// append the svg object to the body of the page
var svg = d3.select("#my_dataviz")
.append("svg")
  .attr("width", width + margin.left + margin.right)
  .attr("height", height + margin.top + margin.bottom)
.append("g")
  .attr("transform",
        "translate(" + margin.left + "," + margin.top + ")");

// Create Data
var data = [12,19,11,13,12,22,13,4,15,16,18,19,20,12,11,9]

// Compute summary statistics used for the box:
var data_sorted = data.sort(d3.ascending)
var q1 = d3.quantile(data_sorted, .25)
var median = d3.quantile(data_sorted, .5)
var q3 = d3.quantile(data_sorted, .75)
var interQuantileRange = q3 - q1
var min = q1 - 1.5 * interQuantileRange
var max = q1 + 1.5 * interQuantileRange

// Show the Y scale
var y = d3.scaleLinear()
  .domain([0,24])
  .range([height, 0]);
svg.call(d3.axisLeft(y))

// a few features for the box
var center = 200
var width = 100

// Show the main vertical line
svg
.append("line")
  .attr("x1", center)
  .attr("x2", center)
  .attr("y1", y(min) )
  .attr("y2", y(max) )
  .attr("stroke", "black")

// Show the box
svg
.append("rect")
  .attr("x", center - width/2)
  .attr("y", y(q3) )
  .attr("height", (y(q1)-y(q3)) )
  .attr("width", width )
  .attr("stroke", "black")
  .style("fill", "#69b3a2")

// show median, min and max horizontal lines
svg
.selectAll("toto")
.data([min, median, max])
.enter()
.append("line")
  .attr("x1", center-width/2)
  .attr("x2", center+width/2)
  .attr("y1", function(d){ return(y(d))} )
  .attr("y2", function(d){ return(y(d))} )
  .attr("stroke", "black")
</script>

"""
)

Embed a Power BI report in a notebook

Important

This feature is currently in PREVIEW. This information relates to a prerelease product that may be substantially modified before it's released. Microsoft makes no warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to the information provided here.

The Powerbiclient Python package is now natively supported in Fabric notebooks. You don’t need to do any extra setup (like authentication process) on Fabric notebook Spark runtime 3.4. Just import powerbiclient and then continue your exploration. To learn more about how to use the powerbiclient package, see the powerbiclient documentation.

Powerbiclient supports the following key features.

Render an existing Power BI report

You can easily embed and interact with Power BI reports in your notebooks with just a few lines of code.

The following image is an example of rendering existing Power BI report.

Screenshot of a spark visual rendering a Power BI report.

Run the following code to render an existing Power BI report.

from powerbiclient import Report

report_id="Your report id"
report = Report(group_id=None, report_id=report_id)

report

Create report visuals from a Spark DataFrame

You can use a Spark DataFrame in your notebook to quickly generate insightful visualizations. You can also select Save in the embedded report to create a report item in a target workspace.

The following image is an example of a QuickVisualize() from a Spark DataFrame.

Screenshot of a Power BI report from a dataframe.

Run the following code to render a report from a Spark DataFrame.

# Create a spark dataframe from a Lakehouse parquet table
sdf = spark.sql("SELECT * FROM testlakehouse.table LIMIT 1000")

# Create a Power BI report object from spark data frame
from powerbiclient import QuickVisualize, get_dataset_config
PBI_visualize = QuickVisualize(get_dataset_config(sdf))

# Render new report
PBI_visualize

Create report visuals from a pandas DataFrame

You can also create reports based on a pandas DataFrame in notebook.

The following image is an example of a QuickVisualize() from a pandas DataFrame.

Screenshot of a report from pandas dataframe.

Run the following code to render a report from a Spark DataFrame.

import pandas as pd

# Create a pandas dataframe from a URL
df = pd.read_csv("https://raw.githubusercontent.com/plotly/datasets/master/fips-unemp-16.csv")

# Create a pandas dataframe from a Lakehouse csv file
from powerbiclient import QuickVisualize, get_dataset_config

# Create a Power BI report object from your data
PBI_visualize = QuickVisualize(get_dataset_config(df))

# Render new report
PBI_visualize

When it comes to data visualization, Python offers multiple graphing libraries that come packed with many different features. By default, every Apache Spark pool in Fabric contains a set of curated and popular open-source libraries.

Matplotlib

You can render standard plotting libraries, like Matplotlib, using the built-in rendering functions for each library.

The following image is an example of creating a bar chart using Matplotlib.

Screenshot of a line graph created with Matplotlib.

Screenshot of a bar chart created with Matplotlib.

Run the following sample code to draw this bar chart.

# Bar chart

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

x1 = [1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9]
y1 = [4, 7, 2, 4, 7, 8, 3]

x2 = [2, 4, 6, 8, 10]
y2 = [5, 6, 2, 6, 2]

plt.bar(x1, y1, label="Blue Bar", color='b')
plt.bar(x2, y2, label="Green Bar", color='g')
plt.plot()

plt.xlabel("bar number")
plt.ylabel("bar height")
plt.title("Bar Chart Example")
plt.legend()
plt.show()

Bokeh

You can render HTML or interactive libraries, like bokeh, using the displayHTML(df).

The following image is an example of plotting glyphs over a map using bokeh.

Screenshot of an example of plotting glyphs over a map.

To draw this image, run the following sample code.

from bokeh.plotting import figure, output_file
from bokeh.tile_providers import get_provider, Vendors
from bokeh.embed import file_html
from bokeh.resources import CDN
from bokeh.models import ColumnDataSource

tile_provider = get_provider(Vendors.CARTODBPOSITRON)

# range bounds supplied in web mercator coordinates
p = figure(x_range=(-9000000,-8000000), y_range=(4000000,5000000),
           x_axis_type="mercator", y_axis_type="mercator")
p.add_tile(tile_provider)

# plot datapoints on the map
source = ColumnDataSource(
    data=dict(x=[ -8800000, -8500000 , -8800000],
              y=[4200000, 4500000, 4900000])
)

p.circle(x="x", y="y", size=15, fill_color="blue", fill_alpha=0.8, source=source)

# create an html document that embeds the Bokeh plot
html = file_html(p, CDN, "my plot1")

# display this html
displayHTML(html)

Plotly

You can render HTML or interactive libraries like Plotly, using the displayHTML().

To draw this image, run the following sample code.

Screenshot of a map of the United States created with plotly. 

from urllib.request import urlopen
import json
with urlopen('https://raw.githubusercontent.com/plotly/datasets/master/geojson-counties-fips.json') as response:
    counties = json.load(response)

import pandas as pd
df = pd.read_csv("https://raw.githubusercontent.com/plotly/datasets/master/fips-unemp-16.csv",
                   dtype={"fips": str})

import plotly
import plotly.express as px

fig = px.choropleth(df, geojson=counties, locations='fips', color='unemp',
                           color_continuous_scale="Viridis",
                           range_color=(0, 12),
                           scope="usa",
                           labels={'unemp':'unemployment rate'}
                          )
fig.update_layout(margin={"r":0,"t":0,"l":0,"b":0})

# create an html document that embeds the Plotly plot
h = plotly.offline.plot(fig, output_type='div')

# display this html
displayHTML(h)

Pandas

You can view HTML output of pandas DataFrames as the default output. Fabric notebooks automatically show the styled HTML content.

Screenshot of a table created with pandas. 

import pandas as pd 
import numpy as np 

df = pd.DataFrame([[38.0, 2.0, 18.0, 22.0, 21, np.nan],[19, 439, 6, 452, 226,232]], 

                  index=pd.Index(['Tumour (Positive)', 'Non-Tumour (Negative)'], name='Actual Label:'), 

                  columns=pd.MultiIndex.from_product([['Decision Tree', 'Regression', 'Random'],['Tumour', 'Non-Tumour']], names=['Model:', 'Predicted:'])) 

df

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