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

Splitting a column by delimiter

One of the most common transformation steps in Power Query is Split Column by Delimiter. There are many use cases for this transformation. The following are some of the use cases:

  • Splitting First Name, Middle Name, and Last Name from a Full Name column
  • Splitting date, time, and time zone elements from DateTimeZone values into separate columns
  • Splitting comma-delimited values into separate columns

Let us move forward with a scenario. In the previous section’s scenario, we converted the OrderDateTime column’s type to Date. In this scenario, the business needs to analyze the Internet Sales data at both the Date and Time levels. There are many techniques we can use to satisfy this new requirement, such as the following:

  • Creating a new Time table, which can be done either using DAX (we discussed this in Chapter 2, Data Analysis eXpressions and Data Modeling, in the Creating a Time dimension with DAX...