One of the steps that often does not get discussed in Power BI Development is the most important in so many ways. Understanding the needs of a Report before starting to make a report is an absolute must.
Dimensions. Sketching out plans before you start is a huge help for all involved. With our parkrun report, there isn’t a huge amount that we can do to get it all pieced together, thinking through any data challenges, what dimensions do you need and what fact tables? Remember, “What do I need to aggregate?” FACT tables and “What do I need to aggregate it by?”
Kimble always seems complicated; in our example, we are going to use “People” and “Events” as our Dimensions and the bridge table – “Participation” – as our Fact table. Bridge tables are a concept that can be alien to people when they first come to a more Database style of solution. Kimble schemas rely on One-to-Many relationships, that is where one value in your Dimension table can be replicated many times (zero to infinite) in your fact table for example, one date in your calendar table can be used many times in your sales table, or you may have one or more sales on any given day.
Keep with our Weekend Work series, we’ll keep going through the processes involved in building our parkrun report, and we’ll prepare the next iteration of it.