Building a Power BI Semantic Model

The semantic models developed in Power BI Desktop are at the center of Power BI projects as they sit between data sources and visualizations to define business logic and process the queries generated by reports and dashboards. Simply stated, a semantic model is a logical layer that includes all tables, data transformations, relationships between tables, and calculations. Well-designed semantic models provide a user-friendly interface to support rapid data exploration and report development and serve as a trusted, highly scalable, and performant data source for the organization. Properly designed semantic models leverage the data connectivity and transformation capabilities described in Chapter 2, Accessing, Retrieving, and Transforming Data, to provide an integrated view of distinct business processes and entities. Additionally, semantic models contain predefined calculations, hierarchies and groupings, and metadata to greatly enhance both the analytical...