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 2: Data Analysis eXpressions and Data Modeling

We covered in the previous chapter that Power BI has different layers: data preparation, data modeling, and data visualization. This chapter discusses Data Analysis eXpressions (DAX), and it relates to data modeling. Although data modeling and DAX are connected such that you cannot imagine one without the other, our goal in this book is not to focus only on DAX. Data modeling encompasses much broader concepts, while DAX is the expression language that developers must use to implement business logic in the data model. Our assumption in this book is that you have basic to intermediate knowledge of DAX; therefore, we will not cover basic DAX concepts. Instead, we will focus on more advanced DAX concepts with hands-on scenarios.

This chapter covers the following topics:

  • Understanding virtual tables
  • Relationships in virtual tables
  • Time intelligence