Forum Discussion
Power BI and Data Warehousing strategy
Anonymous This is the other thread I was refrencing. The "concerns" I pretty much list out in the differences of my previous post. Size limitations, speed, version control, backup, scalable, re-usable - are all factors I think of when implementing larger solutions.
I'm not aware of any specific documentation, but I don't think Power BI is meant to replace those technologies. I think it is an offering that allows individuals, and small and mid-size companies to get analytics in front of themselves like never before. Traditional server/warehouse/SSAS, or some flavor of that, is still advisable for larger scale implementations for all of the reasons I list above.
I'm very new to Power BI, so I may be missing a technique here, but it seems to me that Power BI is great at aggregating raw data, and drilling through it, but once the source data has been pre-aggregated, I've found that difficulties can arise (like I say, maybe I'm missing a technique).
If the source data has already been averaged (as it has in my case), then you can't just let Power BI combine let's say team-level averages to get a department-level average, because the team sizes may differ significantly. We already have the department-level figures in our source data, but there doesn't seem to be a simple way of conveying the department-team hierarchy to Power BI, in order to drill up and down it.
Is this something to be considered when sourcing data from a data warehouse, or is there a way of dealing with this that I haven't encountered?
Cheers
John