Data Modeling with Microsoft Power BI

Chapter 3. Real-World Examples

Chapters 1 and 2 introduce the basics of a data model and which steps you need to take to build a data model optimized for analytics. This chapter builds upon those steps. Ensure that your data model is built upon these steps before you dive into this chapter’s use cases.

Warning

If you didn’t take all the steps in Chapters 1 and 2, applying the concepts of this chapter might be frustrating because the best basis for advanced concepts is the star schema I describe in those earlier chapters. There is no shortcut to the advanced topics.

In this chapter, I describe five use cases that I encounter when working with many of my customers; I therefore assume that there’s a high likelihood you’ll face them as well sooner or later. The list is, of course, a personal selection; every new project comes with its own challenges, and I can’t predict every unique circumstance you’ll run into.

“Binning” describes the challenge of not showing the actual value, but a category the value falls into instead. In “Budget”, I use the case of budget values to introduce a data model containing more than a single fact table (which still conforms with the rules of a star schema). I’m excited (and proud of) “Multi-Language Model”, which describes the problem of giving the report user full control over the display language of the report (i.e., headlines and content) and my solution. It’s similar to “Key-Value Pair Tables”. A data source for a data model of one of my customers ...