Book Image

Expert Data Modeling with Power BI

By : Soheil Bakhshi
Book Image

Expert Data Modeling with Power BI

By: Soheil Bakhshi

Overview of this book

This book is a comprehensive guide to understanding the ins and outs of data modeling and how to create data models using Power BI confidently. You'll learn how to connect data from multiple sources, understand data, define and manage relationships between data, and shape data models to gain deep and detailed insights about your organization. In this book, you'll explore how to use data modeling and navigation techniques to define relationships and create a data model before defining new metrics and performing custom calculations using modeling features. As you advance through the chapters, the book will demonstrate how to create full-fledged data models, enabling you to create efficient data models and simpler DAX code with new data modeling features. With the help of examples, you'll discover how you can solve business challenges by building optimal data models and changing your existing data models to meet evolving business requirements. Finally, you'll learn how to use some new and advanced modeling features to enhance your data models to carry out a wide variety of complex tasks. By the end of this Power BI book, you'll have gained the skills you need to structure data coming from multiple sources in different ways to create optimized data models that support reporting and data analytics.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
1
Section 1: Data Modeling in Power BI
4
Section 2: Data Preparation in Query Editor
10
Section 3: Data Modeling
13
Section 4: Advanced Data Modeling

Dealing with inactive relationships

In real-world scenarios, the data models can get very busy, especially when we are creating a data model to support enterprise BI; there are many instances that we have an inactive relationship in our data model. In the majority of cases, there are two reasons that a relationship is inactive, as follows:

  • The table with an inactive relationship is reachable via multiple filter paths.
  • There are multiple direct relationships between two tables.

In both preceding cases, the engine does not allow to activate an inactive relationship to avoid ambiguity across the model.

Reachability via multiple filter paths

A filter path between two tables is when the two tables are related via multiple tables. Therefore, the filter propagates from one table to the other via multiple hops (relationships). The following diagram shows a data model with an inactive relationship:

Figure 9.14 – Inactive relationship due...