You have probably noticed that in Power BI service Datasets have recently been replaced by Semantic Models. Model Explorer is a new feature of Power BI Desktop. It is located in the Model view, and enables views and work with complex semantic models that contain tables, relations, measures, roles, calculation groups, cultures, perspectives…
Power BI, similar to Power Pivot, has a look at the tables and their relationships. Its advantage is that, from the very beginning, automatically detects relations between tables based on the name of the column that it discoveres as keys. From November 2018 the new, significantly enhanced Relationship view is offered, so in the following text it will be about what are its features and what is new.
In one of the earlier recipes was discussed about Data model, tables that we’re adding to it and relationships between them. This relationships are not very useful when when we’re writing DAX expressions. If we wan to use, as a formula argument, column from related column you should somehow emphasize it. This is done by using functions RELATED and RELATEDTABLE, and about which you can read more in the following text …
Power Pivot is an interactive tabular report, similar to traditional Pivot table, from which it differs in that it is based on tables that belong to the Data model. It can handle large amount of data that are unpacked when needed, when we have to use them in report, thus saving memory space. It has several specific options, such as KPI, hierarchies or data sets, which can be very helpful when we are making complex reports.
We use Data model, in which we add and connect several tables, to create reporting dataset. In one of previous recipes we were talking about creating links between tables by dragging & dropping keys. The subject of this post will be manual modifying, changing properties or removing data connection. Also you’ll be able to see properties of tables imported from other data sources, such as MS SQL, MS Access etc.