Paul Turley offers up some guidance on when to use which language when building Power BI models:
As a general rule of thumb, in formal SSAS projects built on a relational data mart or data warehouse that is managed by the same project team as the BI data model, I typically recommend that every table in the model import data from a corresponding view or UDF stored and managed in the relational database. Keep in mind that is the way we’ve been designing Microsoft BI projects for several years. Performing simple tasks like renaming columns in the SSAS data model designer was slow and cumbersome. Performing this part of the data prep in T-SQL was much easier than in SSDT. With the recent advent of Power Query in SQL Server Data Tools, there is a good argument to be made for managing those transformations but the tool is still new and frankly I’m still testing the water. Again, keep changes in one place for future maintenance.
Do your absolute best to avoid writing complex SQL query logic that cannot be traced back to the sources. Complicated queries can become a black box – and a Pandora’s box if they aren’t documented, annotated and easy to decipher.
But do read Paul’s closing grafs on the importance of not being hidebound.
Comments closed