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

Understanding query parameters

One of the most valuable features is the ability to define query parameters. We can then use defined query parameters in various cases. For instance, we can create a query referencing a parameter to retrieve data from different datasets, or we can parameterize filter rows. With query parameters, we can parameterize the following:

  • Data Source
  • Filter Rows
  • Keep Rows
  • Remove Rows
  • Replace Rows

In addition, we can load the parameters' values into the data model so that we can reference them from measures, calculated columns, calculated tables, and report elements if necessary.

We can easily define a query parameter from Power Query Editor, as follows:

  1. Click Manage Parameters.
  2. Click New.
  3. Enter a name.
  4. Type in some informative description that helps the user to understand the purpose of the parameter.
  5. Ticking the Required box makes the parameter mandatory.
  6. Select a type from the drop-down list...