Data Modeling in Power BI – How to Become a Guardian of the Star Schema

Session description

Are your visuals only reacting very slowly to changes of filters?
Are you suffering from the “DAX-is-complicated” syndrome?
Is the model view very crowdy?

All of these symptoms are very common, if your data model is not in the shape of a star schema.

In Power BI you should always first start with a star schema, before you start your adventure into more complicated challenges. Luckily, transforming any data model into a star schema is not as complicated as it might sound:

• Assign attributes to either a fact or dimension table
• Normalize the fact table
• Denormalize the dimension tables
• Add a date table
• Transform blanks and flags into meaningful descriptions
• Resolve hierarchies into dedicated columns

… and you are on your best way to become a Guardian of the Star Schema and tackle more advanced scenarios:

• Binning of fact values
• Multi-fact data models
• Multi-lingual reports
• Key-Value Pair tables
• Composite models

In this 3h workshop Markus will take the time to introduce the problems and demonstrate each solution in a practical live-demo. Markus will teach you, how you can transform your data in Power Query and when it is time to reach out to DAX.

Markus Ehrenmueller-Jensen

Markus Ehrenmüller-Jensen is the founder of Savory Data and works as a project leader, data engineer and BI architect since 1994. He is an educated software-engineer, graduated business educator and professor for databases and project engineering at HTL Leonding (technical college) and certified as MCSE Data Platform and MCSE Business Intelligence. Markus speaks regularly on international conferences (eg. SQL PASS Summit, SQLBits London, Power Platform Worldtour, SQL Saturdays, SQL Days, SQL PASS Austria, …) and writes articles for well-known journals. In 2013 he co-founded SQL PASS Austria and in 2016 Power Platform Usergroup Austria (both were merged into Data Community Austria in 2021) and organizes Data Community Austria (fka. SQL Saturdays & Data Saturdays) in Vienna since 2014. For his technical leadership in the community he was awarded repeatedly as a Microsoft Data Platform MVP since 2017.