All,
Got a great new book to add to the EDNA book recommendation list - “Expert Data Modeling with Power BI” by MS MVP Soheil Bakhshi. This is a really comprehensive, well-written guide to data modeling written specifically for PBI users, with a lot of nice visuals, screenshots, and sample data and code files. The only thing I don’t like about it is the title, which to me implies it’s intended for an expert audience. There are some expert concepts covered in the book, but I think it’s suitable for users at all level from beginner up.
Soheil does an excellent job conveying complex concepts in simple, easy to understand language. The book covers data prep as well as data modeling, and addresses important areas that many users struggle with, including identifying and building fact and dimension tables, best practices for building a star schema model, handling slowly changing dimensions, handling many-to-many relationship, dealing with active and inactive relationships, using aggregations and dataflows, etc.
If I were building a library from scratch and had to choose just one book for each of the four pillars, here’s what I would choose:
Data Prep - “Collect, Combine and Transform Data Using Power Query in Excel and Power BI” by Raviv
Data Modeling - "Expert Data Modeling with Power BI", by Bakhshi
DAX - “The Definitive Guide to DAX, 2nd ed.”, by Russo and Ferrari
Visualization - " The Visual Display of Quantitative Information" by Tufte
That’s a hell of a reference shelf in just four books.
- Brian