Book Image

Expert Data Modeling with Power BI - Second Edition

By : Soheil Bakhshi
4 (1)
Book Image

Expert Data Modeling with Power BI - Second Edition

4 (1)
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 full-fledged data models using Power BI confidently. In this new, fully updated edition, 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. As you advance through the chapters, the book will demonstrate how to prepare efficient data models in the Power Query Editor and use simpler DAX code with new data modeling features. You'll explore how to use the various data modeling and navigation techniques and perform custom calculations using the modeling features with the help of real-world examples. 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. Additionally, you'll learn valuable best practices and explore common data modeling complications and the solutions to supercharge the process of creating a data model in Power BI and build better-performing data models. 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 high-performing reports and data analytics.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
1
Section I: Data Modeling in Power BI
4
Section II: Data Preparation in Query Editor
10
Section III: Data Modeling
13
Section IV: Advanced Data Modeling
20
Other Books You May Enjoy
21
Index

Dealing with SCDs

The term slowly changing dimensions, or in short, SCD, is a data warehousing concept introduced by the amazing Ralph Kimball. You can learn more about Ralph Kimball here: https://www.kimballgroup.com/about-kimball-group/.

The SCD concept deals with moving a specific dataset from one state to another. Let us look at SCD in more detail with a scenario.

The Adventure Works organization has a human resources (HR) system in which its data is captured in the organization’s data warehouse. Stephen Jiang is a Sales Manager with 10 sales representatives on his team. The source for this scenario is the AdventureWorksDW2019 database, which you can download from here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/samples/adventureworks-install-configure?view=sql-server-ver16&WT.mc_id=DP-MVP-5003466.

The following image shows the sample data for our scenario:

Table  Description automatically generated

Figure 12.1: Stephen Jiang is the sales manager of a team of 10 sales representatives

Brian...