Data Modeling with Microsoft Power BI

Chapter 7. Real-World Examples Using Power BI

In Chapters 5 and 6, I introduce the basic data modeling features of Power BI and typical tasks to transform your data into a useful, performant, and easy-to-understand data model. Now it’s time to take the next step and look at challenges that more advanced data models must face.

This chapter makes clear why Microsoft’s decision to make Power BI a data model–driven tool (as opposed to a report-driven tool) was a brilliant decision. Instead of building transformations specific to the report you need to create, Power BI enables you to build a more generic solution, which can solve very complex challenges. All problems discussed in this chapter would be harder to solve in a report-driven tool.

This chapter’s use cases are independent of each other. All demonstrate different advanced functionalities in Power BI. Mastering them will allow you to solve others problems as well. Here’s a quick overview:

• The first use case (binning) demonstrates how to show a higher-level grouping of a value (e.g., small, medium, large) instead of the actual value, which is sometimes more helpful.

• In “Budget”, you’ll learn about multi-fact data models and their challenges. The data model in this example will contain more than one fact table, as a budget is usually created on a different granularity level than the actual values.

• The available solutions to implement multi-language models didn’t satisfy one of my customer’s needs, so I designed and implemented ...