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

Splitting column by delimiter

One of the most common transformation steps is Split column by delimiter. In many cases, we may need to split a column by a delimiter, such as when we have people's full names in our data. However, the business needs to have separate First Name, Middle Name, and Last Name columns. Let's look at an example. In the previous section, we converted the OrderDateTime column's type into Date. But what if the business requires us to analyze the Internet Sales data at both the Time and Date levels? We can do many things to satisfy this new requirement, such as the following:

  • Create a new Time table, which can be done either using DAX (we discussed this in Chapter 2, Data Analysis eXpressions and Data Modeling, in the under Creating a Time dimension with DAX section) or within the Power Query Editor.
  • Split the OrderDateTime column into two columns – one Date column and one Time column.
  • Create a relationship between the Time...