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

General data preparation considerations

In this section, we'll provide more standard best practices for data preparation in Power Query. By following best practices, we are guaranteed to avoid issues down the road that are hard to identify and hence expensive to rectify.

Consider loading a proportion of data while connected to the OData data source

The Open Data Protocol (OData) was invented initially by Microsoft and is a commonly accepted method for creating and consuming REST APIs, and many systems are accessible via OData. When loading data via an OData connection into Power BI, it is essential to pay extra attention to the amount of data being loaded through the OData connection. In many cases, the underlying data model has wide tables with many columns containing metadata that is not necessarily needed.

A general rule of thumb with all kinds of data sources is only to keep relevant columns during data preparation. We need to pay even more attention to it when we...