Building relationships
A relationship in Power BI simply defines how different tables are related to one another. For example, your customer table may be related to your sales table on the customer key column. You could argue that the building of relationships is the most important aspect of Power BI Desktop. It is this process, the building of relationships, that makes everything else work like magic in Power BI. The automatic filtering of visuals and reports, the ease with which you can author measures with Data Analysis Expressions (DAX), and the ability to quickly connect disparate data sources are all made possible through properly built relationships in the data model.
Sometimes, Power BI Desktop will create the relationships for you automatically. It is important to verify these auto-detected relationships to ensure accuracy.
There are a few characteristics of relationships that you should be aware of, which will be discussed in this section:
- Auto-detected...
