Book Image

Microsoft Power BI Quick Start Guide. - Second Edition

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

Microsoft Power BI Quick Start Guide. - Second Edition

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

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

Role-playing tables with DAX

In Chapter 3, Building the Data Model, you learned how to develop your data model to deal with role-playing tables, by importing a table multiple times. We mentioned then that there was an alternative method using DAX. In this section, we will explore this alternative method and the pros and cons of using DAX versus the method you have previously learned.

Since leveraging DAX does not require importing a table multiple times, you will immediately gain savings on storage and, unlike the other method, with DAX you will not need to manage multiple tables in Power BI Desktop.

The DAX method requires that inactive relationships be created in order to work correctly. Inactive relationships are not often used in DAX because they are not used automatically like active relationships. Unlike active relationships, you can have more than one inactive relationship between two tables.

Let's create a new relationship between the Internet Sales table...