What is difference between Azure's KQL and PowerBI's Power Query?

Question

While I was working with Kusto (Azure DataExplorer (ADX) and ResourceGraph (ARG)), I got to know about MS PowerBI platform has some called PowerQuery.

So In layman's terms how do these two querying technologies differ?

Answer 1

Hello Rajesh Swarnkar,

Welcome to the MS Q&A platform.

Power Query is a data transformation and preparation engine integrated with Microsoft Power BI. It extracts, transforms, and loads data from various sources. Power Query allows performing data transformations and cleaning operations on data before loading it into Power BI. Power Query supports a wide range of data sources, including databases, Excel files, CSV files, web services, etc. It also provides a user-friendly interface for defining data transformations, which are applied using a functional language called M. Power Query also includes a number of advanced features for data cleansing and transformation, including the ability to remove duplicates, split columns, replace values, and perform custom transformations using M code.

Kusto Query Language (KQL) is used to query data in Azure Data Explorer (ADX). KQL can be used to perform complex queries on large volumes of structured and semi-structured datasets, including log analytics, IoT analytics, and application monitoring. Kusto is highly scalable and can handle data volumes ranging from a few gigabytes to petabytes. It also provides built-in data ingestion, indexing, and retention features, making managing large and complex data sets easy.

In short, Kusto is a powerful data analytics platform optimized for querying and analyzing large volumes of data. At the same time, Power Query is a data transformation and cleansing tool that helps users prepare data for visualization in Power BI. Power Query is also able to handle large and complex data sets, which include a number of optimization techniques that allow it to efficiently process and transform data, even when working with millions of rows.

While both technologies can be used for data analysis, they are optimized for different tasks and serve different purposes.

Reference documents:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-query/

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/data-explorer/kusto/query/

I hope this helps! Let me know if you have any further questions.

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