Preface

Nowadays, information is easily accessible via the Internet. A quick search of “What is Power BI?” results in millions of websites and articles about the topic. Here is a condensed definition of Power BI:

Power BI is the data platform subset of a larger Software as a Service (SaaS) platform called Power Platform, offered by Microsoft.

To better understand the preceding definition, we need to know what data platform and SaaS applications are.

A data platform is a comprehensive software framework designed to store, manage, integrate, analyze, and visualize large volumes of data from various sources in a secure, reliable, and scalable manner, enabling organizations to gain insights, make data-driven decisions, and improve their operations and customer experiences. Power BI has all the characteristics of a data platform.

A SaaS application is a subscription-based software solution fully hosted in the cloud that organizations rent and use via the Internet. Power BI is a SaaS application that is subscription-based and fully hosted in Microsoft’s cloud system. It offers various subscription plans, each with its own features, limitations, and toolsets.

It is critical to understand that the core of a data platform is the data itself. Spending time and money on a data platform is worth nothing without paying attention to how the data is stored, prepared, and modeled for analysis. The Power BI platform provides the required tools for that, and we need to have the knowledge to effectively and efficiently use those tools to establish the foundations of our data platform successfully.

This book will guide you to understand the ins and outs of data modeling and the required data preparations. This book teaches you how to connect to multiple data sources, understand the data and its interrelationships, and reshape it to create efficient data models. You will also learn about data exploration and navigation techniques to identify new metrics and perform custom calculations using various data modeling techniques. As you advance through the chapters, the book will demonstrate how to create full-fledged data models, enabling you to develop efficient and performant DAX code with new data modeling features. The book uses various real-world scenarios to ensure you learn practical techniques to solve business challenges by building optimal data models and being flexible in changing existing ones 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 book, you will have gained the skills to structure data from multiple sources in different ways and create optimized data models that support reporting and data analytics requirements.