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PowerBI: Refresh automation with Python

I'm trying to automate the refresh function on PowerBI Desktop (For now I don't want to pay for the Pro Licence) with Python but there are so many packages and I'm getting a bit lost. I wanted to use the win32com package first but PowerBI isn't in the application list of the package. I saw that we can use some Microsoft APIs but I don't want to use loads of ressources for this project.
Is it possible to create this automation with Python?
I accept every suggestion possible.
For information I'm using Pycharm Professional with the latest release of Python.
Thank you in advance for your help!

Just call the REST API: Refresh Dataset in Group. This article looks right: Refresh a Power BI Dataset from Python.

ESRI API for BAO reports in Python

Currently we use ESRI's Business Analyst Online (BAO) to create demographic reports based on geospatial inputs (3-mile ring around an address, or within a city's boundaries, etc.). These are generally output from the point and click web application as PDF or Excel files.
I'm trying to automate the process of retrieving those reports from ESRI BAO. I have installed the Python 3.5+ package arcgis following instructions found here. This seems to get me started with the ArcGIS functionality, but I don't see any API functionality for the BAO toolset. Is there another API package I should be downloading? Or is there documentation on a REST/SOAP API I can call from Python? I've looked over the documentation, but if there's something there about what I'm trying to do I haven't found it.
Has anybody tried to do this before and been successful? Let me know.

After starting trials for several ArcGIS services I found that ArcGIS Online provides access to ESRI's REST API. As of today, once you've signed up (either paying or with a trial) you can navigate to the ArcGIS GeoEnrichment Service Documentation. That documentation tells you everything you need to know about how to access the same reports you would find in ESRI BAO, but through a REST API.

How can I reference libraries for ApacheSpark using IPython Notebook only?

I'm currently playing around with the Apache Spark Service in IBM Bluemix. There is a quick start composite application (Boilerplate) consisting of the Spark Service itself, an OpenStack Swift service for the data and an IPython/Jupyter Notebook.
I want to add some 3rd party libraries to the system and I'm wondering how this could be achieved. Using an python import statement doesn't really help since the libraries are then expected to be located on the SparkWorker nodes.
Is there a ways of loading python libraries in Spark from an external source during job runtime (e.g. a Swift or ftp source)?
thanks a lot!

You cannot add 3rd party libraries at this point in the beta. This will most certainly be coming later in the beta as it's a popular requirement ;-)

Control Applications with python

lately I have been trying to find a way to control applications on my ubuntu using python. What i want to achieve is something like what we can do with applescript in mac.... Control chrome send queries to it etc.
can someone please point me in the right direction as to how one can control applications using python, esp on Ubuntu...or a code snippet maybe?

Read about D-Bus: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-Bus
Python dbus: http://dbus.freedesktop.org/doc/dbus-python/doc/tutorial.html
In order to control a process, it must be connected using dbus in the first place and exporting services. This is the same idea of AppleScript. On a mac, an application has to be exporting services that can be controlled over applescript.
PyQt/PySide has a DBus module as well: http://www.riverbankcomputing.co.uk/static/Docs/PyQt4/html/qtdbus.html

Have you taken a look at Project Sikuli?

Python: Windows registry hive access NOT using registry APIs

I am trying to extract some data out of the Windows registry, both the software hive and ntuser.dat from XP computers. Currently I'm using reg.exe to load the hive and _winreg to extract the data. I need to use reg.exe as the computers I'm backing up data from are usually offline and I'm putting the hard drive from them in an external drive bay and loading the hives from that in another Windows session. It's not feasible to boot up the computers being backed up as they are often failing hard drives or otherwise unbootable.
I've seen a utility called hivex which runs under Linux which combines a c-module with a python wrapper to allow for read-only (limited write) access to the Windows registry, without using the Windows Registry APIs. Sadly there doesn't appear to be a Windows version of hivex, assumingly because no one figured a need to access the Windows registry under Windows by directly accessing the hive files.
I'd love to drop the dependency of reg.exe being called by subprocess.Popen() as calling an external executable has a host of issues, plus it makes the backup utility platform limited.
Does anyone know of a python module which allows for direct access of the hive files themselves? I already know of, and am currently using _winreg, so suggesting that would be less than helpful. Thanks in advance.

I'm not sure how much better it is, but the pywin32 library supplies bindings to most of the windows API. I don't know the windows API well enough to know if you can open arbitrary hive files, however it could be worth a quick look (the release contains a CHM with the full API mapping).

Did you have a look to regobj it provides pythonic access to registry value (but it is still based on _winreg)

Is your problem with calling an external application or using the registry APIs? If it is the former you can load and unload hives yourself using RegLoadKey / RegUnLoadKey. If it is the latter then I'm sure somebody has written a C library to parse hives directly. A quick Google search gave me Microsoft's Offline Registry Library.