Calculation Groups within Power BI are amazing. When executed properly, they provide your customer base with a rich set of advanced skews that can be applied to their Measures or Metrics, like so much, however, these must be considered in advance, so show the need to plan and prepare. Power BI in the service, though, isn’t just about planning your Data Model. You have to plan your deployment strategy as well. Will you have multiple environments? If so, will they be in multiple areas on just covering a single area? There is no right answer here. This is something that will very much depend on your business and what you plan to do, how you will deploy your end reports, how changes will be triaged, tested and managed… The list goes on!
Calculation Groups require you to have Tabular Editor installed to configure and set these up. In our example, we use the free version. This works perfectly well for what we are doing. Calculation Groups allow you to prepare sets of support measures tailored by the measure you provide to it. Our video uses the NYC Taxi Dataset and shows it being used with Journey Counts, Total Tip Amount, and Tip %.
The power of Calculation Groups is that they do not need to have a standard measure assigned to them; rather, they will apply any steps you want to build the required Calculation Item sets. This works extremely well with various measures, although it is often utilised with Time Intelligence. So all your customer needs to be able to do is write a simple aggregation. They can then have the Time Intelligence versions available immediately using the Calculation Groups from the Primary Report File.
When Planning your Power BI Environment, one thing that is often mentioned is Dev and Test (or QA). Can you complete your Power BI in a single workspace? Well no! It is unlikely that a single workspace will ever work for your business, so… Given that one will not work, how many do I need? Is it possible to then have a single “tier” for each report set? This will work, but some may want to have a Development or Test Environment. The reality is that you can use a single environment, although you will likely find updates being routed through peoples “My Workspaces”. It is also possible to use Power BI Development Pipelines (with Premium), as shown below.
View the NYC Yellow Taxi Report from 2017 – 2020