How can you master advanced BI techniques and models?

Bring a product mindset to Business Intelligence. What's a Product Mindset? If a business user asks for "What were our sales for December 2022?", he/she may have a need to view data for other time periods. Rather than hard coding a month, provide a date picker or a date filter? Hurray! You just generalized this dashboard for multiple use cases. Now the next question can be a further breakdown by categories or region or some other dimension. The bottom line is don't take what business users tell you at face value? Continuously question yourself if you can broaden the use case. However, there is a limit. Remember. A dashboard that attempts to solve too many problems does not solve any problem.

The first step in mastering advanced BI techniques and models is to understand what problem you’re trying to solve. Choosing the techniques can come later when you understand what problem you’re trying to solve, and how success will be measured. You can’t simply write SQL or choose an ETL tool and hope it will solve the problem. This is what vendor marketing will tell you. You may need ELT, for example, or NoSQL. If you lead with the technology then you’re starting out wrong. Understand the business, their problems and their pain. Understand what ‘good’ looks like.

The first step is always to understand the problem before deep diving into data. As if the problem statement is clear then we can proceed about what kind of data is needed to solve it plus from where we can receive this data i.e data sources. In my opinion, techniques are important but they play a major role post we know the nature of the problem and what kind of insights will be needed to solve the issue,after that data transformation techniques can come into picture.

There's ultimately two types of end results: Decision Making and Exploration. The BI tool could make a decision for you or could be a really great tool to help a user make a decision. Or, if your users don't necessarily know what decisions they need to make, they need the ability explore to figure out what's going on in the data easily.

First let's start off with a disclaimer: 𝐘𝐨𝐮 𝐝𝐨𝐧'𝐭 𝐧𝐞𝐞𝐝 𝐭𝐨 𝐤𝐧𝐨𝐰 𝐚𝐥𝐥 𝐨𝐟 𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐬𝐞. But here are some advanced techniques for the Power BI developer: 💠CI/CD 💠MS Fabric 💠Custom Viz 💠External Tools 💠XMLA Endpoint 💠Power BI Security 💠Power BI Rest APIs 💠Legacy BI Migration 💠Power BI Embedded 💠Advanced C# scripting 💠Power BI Administration 💠Dataflows and Datamarts 💠Center of Excellence Model 💠Power BI Organizational Adoption I think there's quite a lot out there - it is much better to choose a niche and learn it well.

Data storytelling is a core skill for any BI developer. Knowledge of how end users absorb information (such as gestalt principles), and UI/UX laws (such as the aesthetic-usability effect, or Fitt's Law) directly impact how well your design will be. Don't sleep on the storytelling!

If you want to go fast, then go alone. If you want to go far, then go together. Advanced analysis is about going farther, not faster. We must understand that, regardless of whether your problem requires a descriptive, diagnostic, predictive, or prescriptive solution, one person is not going to scale the solution beyond a small team or a group. Regardless the of the skill sets you bring to the table, you will need to combine your talents with multiple others to get buy in, resources, and perspective broad enough and deep enough to build something that delivers lasting value to the organization. The quality of the solution will ultimately be a reflection of the quality of the team or teams that build it.