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

Chapter 10: Advanced Data Modeling Techniques

In the previous chapter, we looked at some data modeling best practices, such as dealing with many-to-many relationships using bridge tables, dealing with inactive relationships, and how to programmatically enable them. We also learned how to use config tables, organize our data model, and reduce the model's size by disabling the Auto date/time feature in Power BI Desktop.

This chapter will discuss some advanced data modeling techniques that can help us deal with more complex scenarios more efficiently. Some techniques we'll discuss in this chapter only used to be available for the data models that were backed in a premium capacity. However, they are now available under the Power Pro licensing plan as well. In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

  • Using aggregations
  • Incremental refresh
  • Understanding parent-child hierarchies
  • Implementing roleplaying dimensions
  • Using calculation groups
...