Paul Turley continues a series on doing Power BI the right way:
I was just talking to a consulting client about the best approach to build a data model and he told me something very interesting about the way they were loading data into Power BI. He said “We don’t use facts and dimensions, we load all of our data into one huge table.” He said that their data model performs well and that it meets their reporting needs. It is a difficult point to argue, when something is working at the time although the design might not follow the accepted rules. Life is like that and there are plenty of analogies to make the point that a practice, even a real bad practice, might solve a problem for a period of time and under certain conditions. <analogy>You can drive a car at excessive speed to get to your destination faster. You might not get caught by the police on that day and you might not crash but eventually, if you make it a habit, this practice will catch up to you.</analogy> Data is like that. If you don’t play by the rules, you limit your options. Bending the rules lets you move faster and sometimes with less hassle. But, as the project scope expands – and after adding enough data or other complexities to the solution, it will not endure. The data model won’t perform well, won’t load the correct data or it just won’t be reliable.
This post will explore the realities of best practice design for large data models; some important considerations and trade-off decisions when working with both “big data” and “large data”.
Read on for Paul’s tips.