Qubole Inc. is giving its users another option to dig into their data and gain further insights through an integration with Microsoft Corp.’s Power BI business analytics service.

Qubole sells a popular cloud-based platform that allows workers without coding skills to connect to and analyze big data. The Qubole Data Service, released today, provides a simplified interface through which users can enter simple queries about their data, without any special skills.

QDS also features an implementation of Qubole’s Presto distribution, which is a supported version of the open-source Apache Presto distributed SQL query engine. That’s used for highly interactive data exploration and can pull information from multiple sources.

As for Power BI, it provides interactive data visualizations with self-service business intelligence capabilities, allowing users to create reports and dashboards easily without any skills. With the integration, the capabilities of Presto and Power BI are essentially being combined, providing new interactive analytics features that can generate new kinds of insights and serve them up in a format that’s easy to consume.

“Qubole Presto and Power BI enable businesses to run self-service federated queries from unstructured, semi-structured, and structured data sources for reports, visualizations, mashups and powerful dashboards published in the Power BI Service,” the companies said in their pitch.

Another big advantage of using Presto with Power BI is that users can now pull data from several sources at once, instead of a single location. Presto also ensures that no latency results from the local processing of large amounts of data, Qubole said.

James Kobielus, lead analyst with Wikibon, owned by the same company as SiliconANGLE, said the new features should help Qubole to target Microsoft’s much bigger customer base.

“I’m sure it will reduce latencies on the more complex and distributed queries, so this will add value for Microsoft customers and enable Qubole to reach a larger addressable customer base for their big-data-as-a-service offerings,” Kobielus said.

Qubole is also integrating its platform with Microsoft’s recently announced Azure Data Lake Store Gen 2 preview program, which will allow users to process “exabytes of big data” in the cloud for artificial intelligence and analytics workloads.

“As the shift to cloud accelerates, businesses are looking to remove complexity and costs while knowing their data platforms can grow and evolve with them as technologies advance,” Ashish Thusoo, co-founder and chief executive officer of Qubole, said in a statement. “By introducing support for Power BI with Presto, Qubole is providing Azure users with the tools to simplify and automate big data and ML operations, drive down costs and optimize results.”

Image: Qubole