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

Duplicating and referencing queries

Duplicating and referencing a query are somehow similar. We duplicate a query when we need to have all the transformation steps we already took on the original query. At the same time, we want to change those steps or add some more transformation steps. In that case, we must change the original query's nature, translating it so that it has a different meaning from a business point of view. But when we reference a query, we are referencing the final results of the query. Therefore, we do not get the transformation steps in the new query (the referencing query). Referencing a query is a common way to break down the transformation activities in a more organized way. This is the preferred way of doing data preparation for most Extract, Transformation, and Load (ETL) experts and data warehousing professionals. In that sense, we can do the following:

  • We can have base queries that are connected to the source system that resemble the Extract...