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

Working with connection modes

When we get data from a data source, the query connection mode falls into one of the following three different categories:

  • Data Import
  • DirectQuery
  • Connect Live

Every query connecting to one or more data sources in the Power Query Editor has any of the preceding connection modes, except Connect Live. When the connection mode is Connect Live, a Power BI model cannot currently connect to more than one instance of SSAS, AAS, or a Power BI dataset.

Note

Microsoft released the preview of the new version of the composite models in December 2020. With the new version of composite models, we can DirectQuery to more than one instance of AAS or Power BI datasets. The new composite models currently do not support SSAS Tabular. We will discuss composite models in more detail in Chapter 12, Extra Options and Features Available for Data Modeling.

In this section, we look at the connection modes, their applications, and their limitations...