DETROIT – Power BI is a business analytics solution tool that lets you visualize your data and share insights across your organization. It stands out with streamlined publication and distribution capabilities, as well as integration with other Microsoft products and services. There are free guides like Power BI for beginners where you can learn everything you need. 

As you dive into Power BI and start leveraging its capabilities, you may encounter situations where you need expert guidance or encounter more complex use cases. In these instances, it can be helpful to have access to professional resources and support. You can visit here to get Microsoft Power BI support, which can offer valuable insights and troubleshooting assistance for various challenges. By utilizing these resources, you can ensure that your team is well-equipped to make the most of Power BI’s powerful features and capabilities.

Power BI is a business analytics tool used to manipulate and analyze data from a variety of sources.

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Star schema on the other hand is the logical description of these datasets where data is divided into facts, tables, and dimension tables. The facts table contains the actual information while the dimension table contains the related information.

It optimizes performance by keeping queries simple and providing fast response time because all the information related to each level is stored in one row.

Now that you understand what star schema is and what dimensions and fact tables are, let’s look at why star schemas are important to your power BI processes and why you should use them in Power BI.

Performance

Have you been wondering what kind of data organization style provides the best performance? Star schema has it all. Using star schema is one of the best ways to set up your Power BI data model. 

It contains clear join paths and a relatively small number of tables for a BI-style workload. When you present your data using an ELT paradigm with a tool like DBT, it comes in to help run the ELT and support BI-type queries in tools like Looker or Periscope.

When you use star schema instead of a single table with no dimensions, you will experience a substantial improvement in query times. 

This means that queries will run more quickly than they would on an operational system. The speed improvement with star schema is about 25%-50% depending on the tool you are using.

With all the data in it, star schema design will take up less disk space, while promoting better ELT code conceptualization and organization, thus making it easier for end-users to navigate (analysts and query-writers). 

Scalability

Star schema can accommodate all the changes you would like to make in your power BI processes such as adding new dimensions. 

When you have tables with many rows in each, with common dimension tables containing lots of rows as well, query generation might trouble you. 

However, star schema will handle this automatically with no special modeling or pre-processing working at a terabyte-scale to generate queries.

Your BI processes will handle such complexities and scale all the dimensions and tables with the help of star schema implementation, and this will significantly increase the success and flexibility of your BI initiative.

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Simplicity

Star schema is the simplest data warehouse schema to use. It is very easy to understand, read, and implement. Dimensions are used to slice and dice the data and summarize it to provide optimal disk usage.

It is largely supported by BI tools, the size of your data notwithstanding. Organizing the data into facts and dimensions is intuitive and time-efficient.

There are also alternatives to the star schema such as the snowflake schemas that will help you logically arrange your tables in a multidimensional database, and galaxy schemas that contain two fact tables that share dimension tables between them. This will help you get more benefits out of modeling your data in a different way.

Real-time information

Star schema will allow your Power BI dashboard to update in real-time as data is streamed in. 

This will give you the ability to quickly identify opportunities and solve problems as soon as they arise. 

Star schema separates business data into facts and dimensions which can be displayed, updated, and reported in real-time data and visuals. You can choose to stream this data from factory sensors or social media sources from which time-sensitive data can be collected.

Star schema also provides you with a more simplified business reporting logic compared to highly normalized schemas. 

It simplifies the common business reporting logic such as period-over-period and as-of reporting logic. It also provides performance enhancements for read-only reporting applications.

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Support

Ensuring all the business processes are under control is getting harder every day because of the large volumes of data. You will need help with your power BI processes by using modern and professional BI tools with the help of a star schema. 

It is one of the most widely used schemas because it is understood by many and supported by many BI tools such as datapine, SAS business intelligence, clear analytics, and metric insights.

These tools will step up into collecting, analyzing, monitoring, and predicting future business scenarios, by creating a clear perspective of all the data that you manage.

Conclusion

Before you analyze your data with Power BI, you’ll need to replicate data from all of your sources into a data warehouse. Star schema will then help form a logical implementation and representation of related data. 

It is one of the most commonly used schemas for the logical implementation of related data which makes it easy to combine data from all your sources for a holistic view of your business.

This guest column was provided by Renata Kalsbeek.