Book Image

Microsoft Power BI Quick Start Guide - Second Edition

By : Devin Knight, Erin Ostrowsky, Mitchell Pearson, Schacht
Book Image

Microsoft Power BI Quick Start Guide - Second Edition

By: Devin Knight, Erin Ostrowsky, Mitchell Pearson, Schacht

Overview of this book

This revised edition has been fully updated to reflect the latest enhancements to Power BI. It includes a new chapter dedicated to dataflow, and covers all the essential concepts such as installation, designing effective data models, as well as building basic dashboards and visualizations to help you and your organization make better business decisions. You’ll learn how to obtain data from a variety of sources and clean it using Power BI Query Editor. You’ll then find out how you can design your data model to navigate and explore relationships within it and build DAX formulas to make your data easier to work with. Visualizing your data is a key element in this book, and you’ll get to grips rapidly with data visualization styles and enhanced digital storytelling techniques. In addition, you will acquire the skills to build your own dataflows, understand the Common Data Model, and automate data flow refreshes to eradicate data cleansing inefficiency. This guide will help you understand how to administer your organization's Power BI environment so that deployment can be made seamless, data refreshes can run properly, and security can be fully implemented. By the end of this Power BI book, you’ll have a better understanding of how to get the most out of Power BI to perform effective business intelligence.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)
10
Other Books You May Enjoy
11
Index

DirectQuery

Many of you have likely been trying to envision how you may implement these data imports in your environment. You may have asked yourself questions such as the following:

  • If data imported into Power BI uses an in-memory technology, did my company provide me with a machine that has enough memory to handle this?
  • Am I really going to import my source table with tens of billions of rows into memory?
  • How do I handle the requirement of displaying results in real time from the source?

These are all excellent questions that would have many negative answers if the only way to connect to your data was by importing your source into Power BI. Fortunately, there is another way. Using DirectQuery, Power BI allows you to connect directly to a data source so that no data is imported or copied into Power BI Desktop.

Why is this a good thing? Consider the questions that were asked at the beginning of this section. Since no data is imported...