Data Modeling with Microsoft Power BI

Part II. Data Modeling in Power BI

This second part of the book concentrates on the specialties of Power BI’s features when it comes to data modeling. I will walk you through the basic concepts, problems, and solutions. Part II keeps DAX, Power Query, and SQL out of the game as much as possible—their specialties are discussed in later parts of this book.

First, I will introduce you to the Model view and its parts in Chapter 5:

• Tables

• Columns

• Relationships

You will learn that Power BI doesn’t use the terms primary key and foreign key, but they still play an important role when it comes to relationships and their cardinality.

In the Model view, you won’t combine tables, only define their relationships. Still, it’s important to understand how to build a data model, which is easy to understand and allows for performant queries later.

Chapter 6 is all about building a data model, which works optimally in Power BI:

• Finding the right way to normalize and denormalize tables

• Telling Power BI the formulas of your calculations

• Providing Power BI with a date (and optionally a time) table

• Implementing a solution for tables, which play more than one role inside the data model

• Taking care of slowly changing dimensions

• Combining columns into a hierarchy

I pick up the real-world use cases discussed in Chapter 3 and go over some important concepts that you’ll use in Power ...