Forum Discussion
Data Model with Multiple Companies
In order to deal with potential duplicated IDs, you'll probably need to re-index the Customers, Salesperson, Buyers, and Vendor tables so that it's possible to have, for example, the same customer/buyer/vendor associated with multiple companies. Sales and Purchases should get a new Company ID column each. The other dimension tables could as well, but don't necessarily need active relationships with Company.
This is my basic idea:
Disclaimer: Since I haven't spent more than a few minutes considering this, consider it more of a possible approach to mull over rather than anything definitive. You know your own situation far better than I do.
However, won't this cause an issue where the Company table will be filtering the Inventory table via both Sales and Purchases?
You are correct. That does create an ambiguous filter path and one possible resolution would be to relate Company directly to Inventory and de-activate the other two relationships.
In general, relationships between fact tables are not a great idea, so you may want to consider relating Inventory directly to its relevant dimension tables rather than through Sales and Purchases.
I agree with your comment that relating fact tables is not a good idea. I've committed a bit of a moral sin on this model in that respect. However, I can't come up with a way around it, given what I'm trying to achieve. A specific use case of this model is that we want to analyze how our sales are being fulfilled (e.g., we select a customer and can see which vendors supplied the inventory for those sales - we use a specific identification inventory system). This allows us to easily evaluate profitability by customer, vendor, salesperson, buyer, etc. Or if a specific Sales Order loses money, we can see the specific vendor that supplied the product for that order. We need high level analysis at the lookup table level as well as granular details for specific sales orders, etc.
I realize tyring to figure out how to make this model into a better star schema is not within the scope of my question here. But that's the context as to why I've build the model in this way and why I'm struggling to figure out the best way to implement this model for multiple companies.
Hi,
Having a similar issue with my ERP model. I've 10 subsidiary companies and need to combine them into a single data model. I've tried creating similar dim & fact tables for each company and then combined them into one table ( consolidated table). But it creates issues in refreshing. I've also tried the composite data model. Then stuck in schedule refreshing.
please see my posted question below,
https://community.powerbi.com/t5/Desktop/COMPOSITE-DATA-MODEL-WITH-NUMEROUS-APIS/m-p/2588804#M913394
So, did you get to succeed on your model? any suggestions for me?
I was able to get my model to work the way I wanted.
For your situation, I recommend combining the same data (e.g., POs) from multiple companies into a single table. Can you explain what your refresh issues were? I may have suggestions to resolve your refresh issue if you provide details.
I think a composite model in this case likely won't be the best approach. I think you want to "stack" your data by company into the same tables.
The reasons for not stacking the data by the company to the same table and keeping each company separately are -
* if any APIs failed at a company level it wouldn't block the loading of other companies' data.
* there are some companies with larger data sets, which create issues in loading
* if we need to add a new company, we can create a data model separately and add it to the composite table without changing every single table
When I tried to build this data model and refresh the composite data model I received the error
"Microsoft.PowerBI.AS.ConnectionDetailsProvider, Single sign-on (SSO) credential is not provided which is required to execute the current request. Note that performing a refresh over a dataset with a calculated table or a calculated column which references a Direct Query data source is not supported within the Power BI service.."