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

Merging queries

The Merge Queries functionality is one of the other common transformation operations we may use in Power Query. The merge queries functionality is useful when you want to denormalize snowflakes and absorb the data that's stored in different tables into one table. Power Query uses one of the following functions behind the scenes when we use Merge Queries from the Power Query Editor UI, depending on the matching type we select via the UI. This can be seen in the following screenshot:

Figure 5.37 – Merging queries via the UI uses different Power Query functions, depending on the matching type

If we do not tick the Use fuzzy matching to perform the merge box, then the following function will be generated by the Power Query Editor:

Table.NestedJoin(FirstTable as table, KeyColumnofFirstTable as any, SecondTable as any, KeyColumnofSecondTable as any, NewColumnName as text, optional JoinKind as nullable JoinKind.Type)

Otherwise, the...