Introduction to Power BI Datamarts

Microsoft announced the public preview availability of Datamarts in May 2022. When authoring this chapter, Datamarts are still in preview, so using them in production environments is not recommended. The Datamarts capability opens endless possibilities for organizations to achieve their data analytics goals on the Power BI platform. Before we look into the Power BI Datamarts, let us take a step back and understand the meaning of a Datamart.

What is a Datamart?

A quick search on the Internet provides multiple definitions by technology-leading companies such as IBM, Amazon, and Oracle. They all agree that a Datamart is a subject-oriented subset of a data warehouse focusing on a particular business unit, department, subject area, or business functionality. The Datamart’s data is usually stored in databases containing a moving frame required for data analysis, not the full history of data. For instance, organizations store the historical...