Exploratory analysis vs explanatory analysis More than that, many people, including me, would consider Power BI as a tool to build data marts using a data warehouse as a source. Power BI, working as a serving layer, can use a data warehouse or a data mart as a source. That’s why there is the old saying “A data warehouse doesn’t have a response time, but a delivery time”. These questions may require an exploratory analysis over the data mart or even the data warehouse. But there is also those 10% of questions which appear out of the blue from a CEO request. 90% of the time the user requirements will be fulfilled by dashboards and reports created from the data mart. That’s where the data marts come to the rescue.Ī data mart can be a more focused and more user-friendly set of data, extracted from the data warehouse and prepared for the end user. These complex structures hold important historical information which can be useful, but most users will need more focused information. These structures are not simple to be used by an end user. A data warehouse can contain complex structures, such as slowly changing dimensions (also know as dimension type 2). I wrote before about the relation between ETL and Power BI in this other article: What’s a data mart?Īccording to its theorical definition, a data mart is a subset of the data warehouse. It’s not always followed or a technical requirement, but it’s a good practice. Power BI uses the Data Warehouse as a source and becomes the serving layer for the company’s data platform. ETL is used to extract data from all production databases to a Data Warehouse. A single source of truth.ĭata warehouses are one implementation of this single source of truth. Every company needs to be sure to have a single watch and keep it always on time. In my country we have an old saying “Who has one watch knows the time, who has two watches only knows the average”. Every company needs a single source of truth.Ĭould you imagine if, when checking the total of active customers in the company, one e-mail report has a number, one Power BI dashboard has a different number, and the production database has a third one? What’s a single source of truth?īefore explaining Datamarts, I will need to start from the beginning.
Next, discover more about what this means for Power BI users and developers.
This new feature expands Power BI possibilities in directions which may be unexpected to many Power BI users. Power BI Datamarts is an important new feature announced during BUILD. Datamarts and exploratory analysis using Power BI - Simple Talk Skip to content
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