Paul Turley's SQL Server BI Blog
sharing my experiences with the Microsoft data platform, Fabric, enterprise Power BI, SQL Server BI, Data Modeling, SSAS Design, SSRS, Dashboards & Visualization since 2009
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Thanks to Chris Webb for the reminder.
The Lakehouse is the evolution of the earlier cloud data platform in many pieces that came with “some assembly required”. All of the components are modern, mature and capable but complicated and require specialized skills. Imagine that the new version is easier to assemble with instructions that are only a few pages with stick figures, and it comes with an Allen wrench.
We’re seeing consulting customers putting Lakehouse and BI solutions on-line in just a few weeks. Then they iterate to scale-up their modern data warehouse/BI platform as they train their Center of Excellence champions and Data Governance organizations as they progress.
In a recent blog post, Paul discussed that DevOps, and specifically CI/CD, principles are essential for modern software development, and Power BI is no exception. Power BI CI/CD for enterprise class projects can be achieved using Azure DevOps, with steps including source control, automated testing, and build and release pipelines.
Even for small, informal BI projects, shaping the data into a dimensional model alleviates complexity, speeds up slow calculations and reduces the data model storage size. I conclude this post by reviewing seven data architectures and the data shaping methods with different degrees of scale.