Analytics Engineering with Microsoft Fabric and Power BI

Chapter 11. Design and Build Semantic Models

A Note for Early Release Readers

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This will be the 11th chapter of the final book. Please note that the GitHub repo will be made active later on.

If you’d like to be actively involved in reviewing and commenting on this draft, please reach out to the editor at [e-mail].

Power BI semantic models translate the conceptual modeling principles you learned earlier in this book into a practical, analytical layer that business users rely on for reporting, dashboards, and decision-making.

In chapter 3, you learned about the theory and fundamentals of data modeling, such as star schemas, fact and dimension tables, and slowly changing dimensions. In chapter 10, you were introduced to Power BI semantic models and their different storage modes. In this chapter, you will learn about practical steps to design and build Power BI semantic models.

Please note that it is not possible to cover everything about Power BI semantic modeling in one chapter. In fact, there are entire books dedicated to this topic. Our goal here is to give you a practical foundation to support your journey as an analytics engineer. We encourage you to enhance your learning through dedicated modeling books, including Markus Ehrenmueller-Jensen’s Data Modeling ...