I have about ten months of experience with Power BI but have used other business intelligence platforms (MicroStrategy, Cognos, Tableau, etc.) for almost 20 years. Most of my experience is in platforms that allow me to define a schema/framework that report developers and power users can use to create their reports within the "service" component of the platform. The schema/framework approach allowed me to centralize and control the definitions and implementation of metrics and attributes. I want to do something similar within Power BI; however, I'm having limited success. I can use Power BI Desktop to create a "standard" model that includes measures; however, I've found that reports built against that published dataset run as Direct Query and some features are disabled. My goal is to create a standard dataset for Finance, one for Marketing, one for Human Resources, etc. and move our Power BI users toward the Power BI service as power users. Has anyone had success in implementing an approach like this in Power BI?
The benefits of the approach include:
- Standardized folder structure within the dataset
- Centralized definitions of metrics
- Minimized redundancy in having multiple datasets with the same structure
