Forum Discussion
Confused about joins
Hi Anonymous ,
You're thinking too much in the moment - think end-product:
Once you've done your T1/T2 merge, you right-click on the T2 query and UNCHECK 'Enable Load'. This prevents this query having to be run when you actually refresh your report in the service, as it doesn't need to be materialised for the data model. This just leaves your merged T1 query to be run which, as you can see, has all the details it needs within its folded native query to produce your merged T1 in the model.
Pete
First
Wait, so you're saying write the query as SQL? From all I can read this is considered bad form, hence me avoiding it.
I'd much rather write an SQL query than use Power Query, but I'm doing my best to learn the correct way of doing things in PBI.
Second
Yes, I know I can filter down, but in this case that still leaves me with a lot more lines than I need. I was hoping there was a more efficient approach, similar to writing a join. Especially since my scenario involves several big tables, not just two.
Toss away those misleading things telling you to avoid sql in PQ! Sql and PQ aren't natual enemies.
Frankingly speaking, nothing is better than sql in terms of performance when it comes to tranditional joins (inner/outer (left/right)/anti-joins); not to mention with huge tables. The advantage of PQ lies in the transformation processing of dataset, for instance, to replace part of a record, aggregation based on specific conditions, etc.