Book Image

Microsoft Power BI Quick Start Guide - Third Edition

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

Microsoft Power BI Quick Start Guide - Third Edition

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

Overview of this book

Updated with the latest features and improvements in Power BI, this fast-paced yet comprehensive guide will help you master the core concepts of data visualization quickly. You’ll learn how to install Power BI, design effective data models, and build basic dashboards and visualizations to help you make better business decisions. This new edition will also help you bridge the gap between MS Excel and Power BI. Throughout this book, you’ll learn how to obtain data from a variety of sources and clean it using the Power Query Editor. You’ll also start designing data models to navigate and explore relationships within your data and building DAX formulas to make data easier to work with. Visualizing data is a key element of this book, so there’s an emphasis on helping you get to grips with data visualization styles and enhanced digital storytelling. As you progress, you’ll start building your own dataflows, gain an understanding of the Common Data Model, and automate dataflow refreshes to eradicate data cleaning inefficiency. You’ll learn 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 know how to get the most out of Power BI for better business intelligence.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)
11
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12
Index

Improving data model performance

Data model performance can be measured in two ways within Power BI, query performance and processing performance. Query performance is how quickly results are returned by visualizations and reports. Processing performance is a measure of how long it takes to perform a data refresh on the underlying dataset. Data model performance as a whole is very important and the Power BI developer should always be aware of how design decisions may affect performance today or in the future. A deep dive into performance is out of the scope of this book, but an overview is provided here.

Query performance

As you learned in Chapter 2, Connecting to Data, there are multiple ways that you can connect to data in Power BI. For example, you can import data, use DirectQuery, use a live connection, or you can use a combination of import and direct queries with the composite model.

Data model design methodologies

Data models in Power BI are specifically designed...