My wife bought me a nice telescope for Christmas. I’ve wanted one since I was a kid. We opened gifts early because we’re going to take the RV out in the dessert to watch the great convergence of Jupiter and Saturn next week. But, what am I doing now, after opening my gift? …updating Power BI Desktop to check-out the new Composite Model feature! This new feature of Power BI has been in the works for several years and we have been anxiously waiting for this announcement. It is truly the Utopian dream; the Holy Grail!
It is hard to articulate the impact that this capability can have for businesses. The new composite model gen 2 feature is a monumental breakthrough that will significantly raise the bar for Power BI model development and could change the way we think about designing enterprise BI solutions – but customers will need guidance to use it correctly. If you haven’t been sitting on the edge of your seat waiting for this announcement, read the announcement and understand how significant this is.
Power BI December 2020 Feature Summary | Microsoft Power BI Blog | Microsoft Power BI
There are been many attempts by Microsoft and other vendors to create a data modelling architecture that provides for fast access to cached data, direct access to live data and scaled-out connections to established data models. Remember ROLAP and HOLAP storage in multidimensional cubes? These were great concepts with significant trade-off limitations. No other vendor has anything like this. Way back in the day, Microsoft jumped on the Ralph Kimball bandwagon to promote the idea that a company should have a “one version of the truth” exposed through their data warehouse and cubes or semantic data models. They met customer demand and gave us a BI tool that, in order to bring data together from multiple sources, makes it easy to create a lot of data silos. Arguably, there are design patterns to minimize data duplication but to use governed datasets, self-service report designers are limited to connecting to large, central models that might only be authored and managed by IT. This new feature can restore balance to the force and bring us back to “one version of the truth” again.
To put this into perspective, here’s a quote from Alberto Ferrari’s recent article: “It is not easy to find a name that accurately describes the massive step forward that is this feature in the evolution of Business Intelligence solutions. It would fully deserve a hyperbolic name, but the marketing departments already overused so many terms over the years: “universe” was already used in the past century; you can imagine what happened after that. We like “composite models” because it is a name that concisely describes the purpose of this new feature.”
Alberto has a great video emphasizing the magnitude of this release: New composite models in Power BI: A milestone in Business Intelligence – SQLBI
Those of us who live a breathe BI will continue to have thoughts, opinions and eventually will have war stories and prescriptive guidance to offer about using this new capability most effectively.
Upon initial review, it seems to work exactly as expected. In future posts, I will demonstrate how to design and implement a next-gen composite model and share my experience and thoughts as we move down this new road.
As there is a very big hype about “composite”, I set some opposed aspects, to maybe balance this discussion, as many user will demand this feature immediatly without evaluating.
http://blog.dataengineer.at/en/composite-ist-da-vorsicht/