DETROIT – Power BI is a business analytics solution tool that allows you to visualize your data and share information within your organization. It is distinguished by streamlined publishing and distribution capabilities, as well as its integration with other Microsoft products and services.

It is a business analysis tool used to manipulate and analyze data from various sources.

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Star diagram on the other hand, there is the logical description of those datasets where the data is divided into facts, tables and tables of dimensions. The fact table contains the actual information while the dimension table contains the associated information.

It optimizes performance by simplifying queries and providing fast response time as all information related to each level is stored on a single row.

Now that you understand what a star schema is and what dimensions and fact tables are, let’s take a look at why star schemas are important to your Power BI processes and why you should use them in Power BI.

Performance

Have you wondered what type of data organization style provides the best performance? The star diagram has it all.

It contains clear join paths and a relatively small number of tables for a BI style workload. When you present your data using an ELT paradigm with a tool like DBT, it helps you run the ELT and support BI-like queries in tools like Looker or Periscope.

When you use a star schema instead of a single table without dimensions, you will see a substantial improvement in query times.

This means that the queries will execute faster than they would on a working system. The speed improvement with the star diagram concerns 25% -50% depending on the tool you are using.

With all the data it contains, designing star schemas will take up less disk space, while promoting better conceptualization and organization of ELT code, making it easier for end users (analysts and query writers) to navigate.

Scalability

The star schema can support any changes you want to make to your Power BI processes, such as adding new dimensions.

When you have tables with many rows in each, with common dimension tables also containing a lot of rows, you might be confused about generating queries.

However, the star schema will handle this automatically without any special modeling or preprocessing running at terabyte scale to generate queries.

Your BI processes will handle these complexities and scale all dimensions and tables using the star schema implementation, greatly increasing the success and flexibility of your BI initiative.

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Simplicity

The star schema is the easiest data warehouse schema to use. It is very easy to understand, read and operate. Dimensions are used to slice and slice data and summarize it to provide optimal disk usage.

It is widely supported by BI tools, regardless of the size of your data. Organizing data into facts and dimensions is intuitive and fast.

There are also alternatives to the star schema such as the snowflake patterns this will help you to logically organize your tables in multidimensional database and galaxy schemas which contain two fact tables which share dimension tables between them. This will help you get more benefits from modeling your data in a different way.

Real time information

The star schema will allow your Power BI dashboard to update in real time as data is released.

This will allow you to quickly identify opportunities and resolve issues as they arise.

The star schema separates business data into facts and dimensions that can be viewed, updated, and reported in real-time data and visuals. You can choose to distribute this data from factory sensors or social media sources from which time sensitive data can be collected.

The star schema also gives you more simplified business reporting logic compared to highly standardized schemas.

It simplifies the common business reporting logic such as period over period and from reporting logic. It also provides performance improvements for read-only reporting applications.

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Support

Ensuring that all business processes are under control is becoming more and more difficult every day due to the large volumes of data. You will need help with your Power BI processes using modern and professional BI tools using a star schema.

It is one of the most used schemas because it is understood by many and supported by many BI tools such as datapine, SAS economic intelligence, clear analyzes and metric information.

These tools will step up in the collection, analysis, monitoring and forecasting of future business scenarios, creating a clear perspective of all the data you manage.

Conclusion

Before you analyze your data with Power BI, you need to replicate data from all your sources in a data warehouse. The star schema will then help to form a logical implementation and representation of the associated data.

It is one of the most commonly used diagrams for the logical implementation of related data, making it easy to combine data from all your sources for a holistic view of your business.

This guest column was provided by Renata Kalsbeek.