Table of contents
So you want to create powerful reports and dashboards? Well Power BI is certainly one of the strongest technologies available to create reports and dynamic dashboards for various roles in your organization.
What is Power BI?
Let's start off with what Microsoft Power BI is. Which is a collection of software apps, services and numerous connectors that work in conjunction to turn various types of data sources into visually immersive, highly dynamic and interactive insights. The data may be in an Excel spreadsheet, or a series of cloud-based as well as on-premise data warehouses. The Power BI service enables you to easily connect these various data sources in order to visualize and discover important analytics to share with anyone you want.
This Video
In this video we will look at the creation of the logical datamodel. Building a great data model basically organizes data and objects represented into data visualizations. Taking various data sources and every data element and making sense out of them by connecting them relationally to build complex dashboards and reports. Ultimately we come up with a highly efficient database schema that will help an organization achieve real time data.
A star schema is one way to simplify a data model. The terminology you learn in this video will be equally important when understanding the process of building the data model. Choosing the correct amount of granularity is also very important for the usability and performance of your Power BI reports.
Working with Tables
You work with tables to create a structure that will be easy to navigate because column and table properties will be specific and user-friendly.
- Use merged/appended tables to simplify tables with a data structure
- Have relationships between tables that make sense
Working with Dimensions
When it comes to business intelligence and power bi desktop we will also have dimensions and fact tables. Fact tables are part of the logical data model and contain information about events such as sales orders, shipping dates, resellers and suppliers. A dimension table stores details about business entities such as products or time, that are connected back to fact tables through a relationship.
Understanding data granularity is important as well. You could settle on data granularity that is weekly, monthly or quarterly. Generally, the fewer the records that you work with the faster your reports and visuals will render. What this results in is a faster refresh rate for the entire model, which may allow more frequent refreshes.
Join Us!
Join us for this video to learn about creating a data model. Remember, all your reports use the data model for the source of their data. It is therefore, very important the data model is created correctly.
