Architect and deploy a Power BI solution. This book will help you understand the many available options and choose the best combination for hosting, developing, sharing, and deploying a Power BI solution within your organization. Pro Power BI Architecture provides detailed examples and explains the different methods available for sharing and securing Power BI content so that only intended recipients can see it. Commonly encountered problems you will learn to handle include content unexpectedly changing while users are in the process of creating reports and building analysis, methods of sharing analyses that don’t cover all the requirements of your business or organization, and inconsistent security models. The knowledge provided in this book will allow you to choose an architecture and deployment model that suits the needs of your organization, ensuring that you do not spend your time maintaining your solution but on using it for its intended purpose and gaining business value from mining and analyzing your organization’s data. What You'll LearnArchitect and administer enterprise-level Power BI solutions Choose the right sharing method for your Power BI solution Create and manage environments for development, testing, and production Implement row level security in multiple ways to secure your data Save money by choosing the right licensing plan Select a suitable connection type—Live Connection, DirectQuery, or Scheduled Refresh—for your use case Set up a Power BI gateway to bridge between on-premises data sources and the Power BI cloud service Who This Book Is For Data analysts, developers, architects, and managers who want to leverage Power BI for their reporting solution

This is the eBook of the printed book and may not include any media, website access codes, or print supplements that may come packaged with the bound book. Introducing Microsoft Power BI enables you to evaluate when and how to use Power BI. Get inspired to improve business processes in your company by leveraging the available analytical and collaborative features of this environment. Be sure to watch for the publication of Alberto Ferrari and Marco Russo's upcoming retail book, Analyzing Data with Power BI and Power Pivot for Excel (ISBN 9781509302765). Go to the book's page at the Microsoft Press Store here for more details:http://aka.ms/analyzingdata/details. Learn more about Power BI at https://powerbi.microsoft.com/.

DAX is the language of data analysis in Microsoft Power BI, Azure Analysis Services, and Excel Power Pivot. DAX is a powerful language that can quickly empower you to analyze year-over-year or rolling 12 months calculations. It is rare to find an analytics solution using Microsoft technologies (especially Power BI) that doesn’t require some calculations to be written by DAX. As a Power BI (or Microsoft BI) developer, it is essential to learn this language and master it. Learning a language is not just learning the structure and functions. It is learning how, where, and when to use it so that you can solve real-world problems with it. In my training and consulting experience on Power BI, I realized that DAX is the weak point for many Power BI users. DAX itself is not a complex language. It is merely a language of expression. The complexity of learning DAX is not the formula or the functions. It is how to use it in real-world scenarios and how it performs on a dataset or visual. I have been writing many blogs about DAX for many years. My blog articles are all coming from my experience working with Power BI. I found it helpful to compile them all in a book. Because my blog articles practically explain things, I thought it better to title it as a practical way of learning DAX by examples. Indeed, there are books, articles, and Microsoft documentation on how each function works where and how. However, learning these through an example would bring a new way of understanding it. A good analytics solution is a combined outcome of a good data model, good data preparation, and good analytics and calculations. I have written another book about the Basics of modeling in Power BI. This book is covering the calculation and DAX aspects of it. This book is for you if you are building a Power BI solution. Even if you are just visualizing the data, calculations are an essential part of analytics. You do need to have the calculation ready before visualizing it. This is not a book to explain every single function in DAX. The approach in this book is to have practical examples. Every chapter is based on real-world examples of using a combination of functions to solve a challenge. You can start from any chapter and finish at any chapter. The order of chapters suggested in this book is just a guideline to help you have a smooth flow of topics. Each chapter can be read without needing other chapters. Examples of this book are designed in a way that you can use the learning straight away in your Power BI file.

Any data analytics solution requires data population and preparation. With the rise of data analytics solutions these years, the need for this data preparation becomes even more essential. Power BI is a helpful data analytics tool that is used worldwide by many users. As a Power BI (or Microsoft BI) developer, it is essential to learn how to prepare the data in the right shape and format needed. You need to learn how to clean the data and build it in the structure that can be modeled easily and used high performant for visualization. Data preparation and transformation is the backend work. If you consider building a BI system as going to a restaurant and ordering food. The visualization is the food you see on the table nicely presented. The quality, the taste, and everything else comes from the hard work in the kitchen. The part that you don’t see or the backend in the world of Power BI is Power Query. You may be already familiar with some other data preparation and data transformation technologies, such as T-SQL, SSIS, Azure Data Factory, Informatica, etc. Power Query is a data transformation engine capable of preparing the data in the format you need. The good news is that to learn Power Query; you don’t need to know programming. Power Query is for citizen data engineers. However, this doesn’t mean that Power Query is not capable of performing advanced transformation. Unfortunately, because Power Query and data preparation is the kitchen work of the BI system, many Power BI users skip the learning of it and become aware of it somewhere along their BI project. Once they get familiar with it, they realize there are tons of things they could have implemented easier, faster, and in a much more maintainable way using Power Query. In other words, they learn mastering Power Query is the key skill toward mastering Power BI. We have been working with Power Query since the very early release of that in 2013, named Data Explorer, and wrote blog articles and published videos about it. The number of articles we published under this subject easily exceeds hundreds. Through those articles, some of the fundamentals and key learnings of Power Query are explained. We thought it is good to compile some of them in a book. A good analytics solution combines a good data model, good data preparation, and good analytics and calculations. Reza has written another book about the Basics of modeling in Power BI and a book on Power BI DAX Simplified. This book is covering the data preparation and transformations aspects of it. This book is for you if you are building a Power BI solution. Even if you are just visualizing the data, preparation and transformations are an essential part of analytics. You do need to have the cleaned and prepared data ready before visualizing it. This book is complied into a series of two books, which will be followed by a third book later; Getting started with Power Query in Power BI and Excel (this book) Mastering Power Query in Power BI and Excel (already available to be purchased separately) Power Query dataflows (will be published later) Although this book is written for Power BI and all the examples are presented using the Power BI. However, the examples can be easily applied to Excel, Dataflows, and other tools and services using Power Query.

Any data analytics solution requires data population and preparation. With the rise of data analytics solutions these years, the need for this data preparation becomes even more essential. Power BI is a helpful data analytics tool that is used worldwide by many users. As a Power BI (or Microsoft BI) developer, it is essential to learn how to prepare the data in the right shape and format needed. You need to learn how to clean the data and build it in a structure that can be modeled easily and used high performant for visualization. Data preparation and transformation is the backend work. If you consider building a BI system as going to a restaurant and ordering food. The visualization is the food you see on the table nicely presented. The quality, the taste, and everything else come from the hard work in the kitchen. The part that you don’t see or the backend in the world of Power BI is Power Query. You may already be familiar with other data preparation and transformation technologies, such as T-SQL, SSIS, Azure Data Factory, Informatica, etc. Power Query is a data transformation engine capable of preparing the data in the format you need. The good news is that to learn Power Query; you don’t need to know programming. Power Query is for citizen data engineers. However, this doesn’t mean that Power Query is not capable of performing advanced transformation. Power Query exists in many Microsoft tools and services such as Power BI, Excel, Dataflows, Power Automate, Azure Data Factory, etc. Through the years, this engine became more powerful. These days, we can say this is essential learning for anyone who wants to do data analysis with Microsoft technology to learn Power Query and master it. We have been working with Power Query since the very early release of that in 2013, named Data Explorer, and wrote blog articles and published videos about it. The number of articles we published under this subject easily exceeds hundreds. Through those articles, some of the fundamentals and key learnings of Power Query are explained. We thought it is good to compile some of them in a book series. A good analytics solution combines a good data model, good data preparation, and good analytics and calculations. Reza has written another book about the Basics of modeling in Power BI and a book on Power BI DAX Simplified. This book is covering the data preparation and transformations aspects of it. This book series is for you if you are building a Power BI solution. Even if you are just visualizing the data, preparation and transformations are an essential part of analytics. You do need to have the cleaned and prepared data ready before visualizing it. This book is compiled into a series of two books, which will be followed by a third book later; Getting started with Power Query in Power BI and Excel (already available to be purchased separately) Mastering Power Query in Power BI and Excel (This book) Power Query dataflows (will be published later) This book deeps dive into real-world challenges of data transformation. It starts with combining data sources and continues with aggregations and fuzzy operations. The book covers advanced usage of Power Query in scenarios such as error handling and exception reports, custom functions and parameters, advanced analytics, and some helpful table and list functions. The book continues with some performance tuning tips and it also explains the Power Query formula language (M) and the structure of it and how to use it in practical solutions. Although this book is written for Power BI and all the examples are presented using the Power BI. However, the examples can be easily applied to Excel, Dataflows, and other tools and services using Power Query.

Manage Power BI within organizations. This book helps you systematize administration as Microsoft shifts Power BI from a self-service tool to an enterprise tool. You will learn best practices for many Power BI administrator tasks. And you will know how to manage artifacts such as reports, users, work spaces, apps, and gateways. The book also provides experience-based guidance on governance, licensing, and managing capacities. Good management includes policies and procedures that can be applied consistently and even automatically across a broad user base. This book provides a strategic road map for the creation and implementation of policies and procedures that support Power BI best practices in enterprises. Effective governance depends not only on good policies, but also on the active and timely monitoring of adherence to those policies. This book helps you evaluate the tools to automate and simplify the most common administrative and monitoring tasks, freeing up administrators to provide greater value to the organization through better user training and awareness initiatives. What You Will Learn Recognize the roles and responsibilities of the Power BI administrator Manage users and their work spaces Know when to consider using Power BI Premium Govern your Power BI implementation and manage Power BI tenants Create an effective security strategy for Power BI in the enterprise Collaborate and share consistent views of the data across all users Follow a life cycle management strategy for rollout of dashboards and reports Create internal training resources backed up by accurate documentation Monitor Power BI to better understand risks and compliance manage costs, and track implementation Who This Book Is For IT professionals tasked with maintaining their corporate Power BI environments, Power BI administrators and power users interested in rolling out Power BI more widely in their organizations, and IT governance professionals tasked with ensuring adherence to policies and regulations

I have been writing and presenting about Row-Level Security in Power BI for many years. Through the comments and feedback I got from my presentations and articles, I felt a need for a place to have everything gathered in one place. The lack of a book that explains everything about the current subject motivated me to end up gathering all my articles in this book. The result is what you are reading. Row-Level Security in Power BI is not about sharing your content. It is, on the other hand, about sharing the same content with a different audience in the way that they see different views of the data. They will have different access to the data. Some of them might see the entire data, and some others might see part of the data that they are authorized to see. Instead of creating multiple reports with the same format, fields, calculations, and visualizations, and only making them different in filtering, the correct way to do it is through row-level security. This will make sure you have the maximum consistency and minimum maintenance for your Power BI project. This is not a book about theories. This is a hands-on book. There are tons of demos and examples with the code samples that you can try. You will learn through this book, what is row-level security. You will learn different types of security and patterns in which you will see the most common challenges for implementing the security and the solution to save them. The book starts with the basics of row-level security, then you will learn about static vs. dynamic row-level security. You will learn patterns such as everyone see their own data, but the manager sees a different view or users and profiles for branch managers. Or the organizational hierarchy, or even the many-to-many relationship challenge of row-level security etc. through this book. This book is not about how to create a report, build a visualization, connect to a dataset, or set up a gateway. If you want to learn those, I do recommend reading my other book: Power BI online book, from Rookie to Rock Star.

I have been dealing with many Power BI challenges in my professional life as a Power BI consultant and a trainer. Challenges normally come as calculation or DAX questions, or sometimes as a performance question. However, after digging deeper into the problem, soon, it will be revealed that the problem is related to a more fundamental challenge; data modeling.If you have a Power BI implementation with many calculation-related or performance-related issues, I strongly suggest looking into your data model because that is where most of the problems start.A good data model is a great base, which upon that, you can build up many stories of calculations and analysis. A bad data model causes problems on every level that you add upon it, and might sometime cause the whole solution to collapse.Fortunately, data modeling is not rocket science. I explained the basic principles of the data modeling with examples in this book. Use this book as the learning path towards a better data model. Most of the tips mentioned in this book are product-agnostic (such as star-schema, dimension, and fact tables). However, this book is particularly designed and developed for a Power BI product user.This book is for you if you are building a Power BI solution. If your task is only visualizing the existing data, this book might not be needed for you. However, What I have seen in many cases, is that the requirement starts with just visualize the data, and then more data tables appear, and you get into the tunnel of data modeling without knowing the principles of it. This book is a guide for you through that tunnel.

Publisher's Note: This edition from 2020 is outdated and is not compatible with the new standards of Microsoft Power Platform. A new Second edition has been published to cover the latest patterns, models, and methodologies leveraging the Microsoft ecosystem to create tailor-made enterprise applications. It combines the powers of Power Apps, Power BI, Azure, and Dynamics 365 to create enterprise applications. Who this book is for This book is for enterprise architects and technical decision makers who want to craft complex solutions using Microsoft Power Platform to serve growing business needs and to stay competitive in the modern IT world. A basic understanding of Microsoft Power Platform will help you to get started with this book.

Analyze company data quickly and easily using Microsoft’s powerful data tools. Learn to build scalable and robust data models, clean and combine different data sources effectively, and create compelling and professional visuals. Beginning Power BI is a hands-on, activity-based guide that takes you through the process of analyzing your data using the tools that that encompass the core of Microsoft’s self-service BI offering. Starting with Power Query, you will learn how to get data from a variety of sources, and see just how easy it is to clean and shape the data prior to importing it into a data model. Using Power BI tabular and the Data Analysis Expressions (DAX), you will learn to create robust scalable data models which will serve as the foundation of your data analysis. From there you will enter the world of compelling interactive visualizations to analyze and gain insight into your data. You will wrap up your Power BI journey by learning how to package and share your reports and dashboards with your colleagues. Author Dan Clark takes you through each topic using step-by-step activities and plenty of screen shots to help familiarize you with the tools. This third edition covers the new and evolving features in the Power BI platform and new chapters on data flows and composite models. This book is your hands-on guide to quick, reliable, and valuable data insight. What You Will Learn Simplify data discovery, association, and cleansingBuild solid analytical data models Create robust interactive data presentations Combine analytical and geographic data in map-based visualizations Publish and share dashboards and reports Who This Book Is For Business analysts, database administrators, developers, and other professionals looking to better understand and communicate with data