Power BI: Likely, You're doing it wrong .!?

This title is clearly a provocation to hold on your attention in this interesting question. Nowadays, the most famous IT field for professionals is related to Data. Anything based on data is of paramount importance for companies. Facing this reality, not only IT workers but also professionals from other areas are improving their skills when it comes to data analysis. The goal is to expose data easily for CEO, managers or whoever makes decisions in the company. These decisions have to be made rapidly and in the majority of the time, there is too much information and only a short time frame to do it.

To try to solve this problem, some Self BI tools have been created. It is through these tools that professionals are developing dashboards, reports and all artefacts necessary to make decisions easily and rapidly. One of the most well-known Self BI tools is Microsoft Power BI. Even if the professional has never worked with database or modelling before, it is possible to create some dashboards or reports. However, it is not as easy as it appears.

The BI (Business intelligence) concept clearly shows that it is necessary to model the data in a multidimensional database, known as DW (data warehouse), to get the best results. Thus, if you are not doing it, likely, you're doing it wrong. Connecting the Power BI in a relational database completely breaks the conception of BI. Whereas relational databases use normalized data, DW is doing exactly the opposite, aggregating and summarizing all data in a non-normalized model. Across that model it is possible to achieve this goal which it is transforming data in information and acknowledgment in a way that the stakeholders can do by themselves without needing to be an IT professional.

To summarize, there are many others reasons why this article’s title could be true for many people. However, it is of vital importance to realize that modelling data before starting the BI project would increase the chance of success with your data analysis. If you are doing it, keep doing, if not, likely, you're doing it wrong.

Diogenes Santos.