Part IV. Data Modeling for Power BI
with the Help of Power Query
This part of the book is all about Power Query. Power Query’s purpose is to bring the information available in any data source into the right shape. Even when the data is already in the correct shape, it runs “through” Power Query. You will come very far by clicking the correct buttons in Power Query’s user interface. Every transformation you are applying to the data is “recorded” as a step in a Power Query query, written in the M language. Only in more advanced cases, though, will you need to lay your hands on such a script.
This part starts with an overview about the basic terms and concepts (in Chapter 13):
Tables and queries
Merging columns to form a primary key
Creating a surrogate key
Combining queries
Chapter 14 will show you the steps you’ll probably need to apply to all your data sources:
Normalizing and denormalizing
Adding calculations
Transforming flags and indicators into meaningful text
Adding a date or time table
Duplicating dimension tables per role
Treating slowly changing dimensions
Flattening parent-child hierarchies
This part teaches you how to solve the real-world examples introduced in Chapter 3 with the help of Power Query (Chapter 15):
Binning
Multi-fact data models
Multi-language data models
Key-value pair tables
Power Query has some interesting features ...
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