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

Getting data from common data sources

With Power BI, we can connect to many different data sources. In this section, we look at some common data sources that we can use in Power BI. We will also look at common pitfalls when connecting to those data sources. But before we start, let's take a moment to discuss a common misunderstanding across many Power BI developers and users on what get data means. When we say get data, we refer to connecting to a data source from the Power Query Editor, regardless of the data source type. Then, we create some transformation steps to prepare the data to be imported into the data model.

While we are working in the Power Query Editor, we have not imported any data into the data model unless we click the Close and Apply button from the Home tab on the ribbon bar (or by clicking the Apply drop-down button). Just after we click the Close and Apply button, data starts being imported into the data model. At this point, you may ask: What is the data...