Power BI Ecosystem
There are three major components of Power BI ecosystem.
Power BI Desktop:
Power BI desktop is the most used product in the Power BI ecosystem. Power BI desktop is suitable for model building and data transformation. Power BI desktop comes with various data connectors which are used to connect different data sources. Power BI also desktop comes with a built-in Query editor which is a perfect data transformation tool.
Power BI Service:
Power BI service is a web-based application by Power BI. The main purpose of this is to enable quick sharing of reports and dashboards. The most important feature of Power BI service is Power BI workspace. A workspace has four major components, i.e., data sets, reports, dashboards, and workbooks. Power BI service can be accessed by authorized users only.
Power BI Mobile:
Power BI mobile is an extension of Power BI service for mobile phones. The Power BI Mobile application is available for both Android and Apple platforms. Just like Power BI service, Power BI mobile can be used to share reports and dashboards. Power BI mobile has some contextual options such as favorite, sharing and refresh.
Connecting data
The first component in learning Power BI is to get data. Power BI has numerous data connectors but the best way to start is to get data from Excel. When you launch Power BI you can find the Excel connector on Home tab.
If you have an excel sheet with many tabs and want to connect with Product and Sales table, then select the Sales and Product sheets from the list.
Power Query
Power Query is the tool that performs Data Extraction, transformation, and loading. The tool is built on M-language’ with an easy-to-use, user-friendly interface. You can learn very quickly how to work with it and how to perform fundamental transformations.
Combining tables to create a model
The next component is data modeling. You need to learn the following core concepts.
Data table: the table containing the facts such as daily sales or purchases.
Lookup table: the table that describes the facts and gives us details for deeper analysis
Primary key: This is the unique ID column in the lookup table
Foreign key: This is found in Data table and contains multiple rows of the primary key column.
To understand Data model in detail: https://powerbitraining.com.au/what-is-a-data-model-in-power-bi/
Table relationship types:
There are different types of table relationships but to begin with you need to understand that lookup tables and data tables have one to many relationships based on primary and foreign key columns. Below is an illustration of a simple data model to demonstrate this concept.
If we take the example of a simple data model of Product Lookup table and Sales Data table, then the data model will look like this.
Notice that the relationship is made based on ProductKey which has unique instances in Product table and multiple in Sales table.
To understand relationship characteristics of a data model: https://powerbitraining.com.au/relationship-characteristics-of-a-data-model/
Conclusion:
Power BI ecosystem consists of Power BI desktop, Power BI mobile and Power BI service application. Each of the three components has its own pros and cons. In this blog post, a brief introduction of Power BI ecosystem is presented along with the basic concepts of procuring data and creating relations.
Learning Power BI from Scratch? Get a complete, in-depth introduction to Microsoft Power BI tool by attending our Power BI Basic Training Course.
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