We run into tables all the time on every problem we have in Power BI, but we don’t really spend time thinking about tables in of themselves. And so, I thought it would be great to dedicate a post to Power BI tables.
I see many cases where Power BI users would say they’re having trouble with a virtual table when it’s not a virtual table they’re dealing with in the first place. It’s important to know the distinctions between Power BI tables.
There are three types of tables that we find regularly in Power BI. The first one is the most common, which is the physical table. This table is really your primary data. The one that often gets confused with the virtual table is this calculated table or what we can also refer to as a DAX expression table. And then, the analogy to measures are the true virtual tables, which are created in the context of measures through the DAX Measure Code.
To make it easy for you to understand and see the difference between these tables, I’ll share with you this Enterprise DNA tutorial made by one of our experts. This tutorial discusses these three tables and their distinctions.
Watch the full video tutorial and find out the differences between these tables and see how that influences the way you handle them.
Now I want to share with you another Power BI tutorial of ours. This one focuses on creating calculated tables using the UNION and ROW functions.
There are many ways to create tables in Power BI, but in this tutorial, you’ll learn a powerful technique that can give you valuable insights. To create a calculated table with a formula, you need to use the New Table feature here in the Modeling ribbon. This feature enables us to use a variety of DAX functions that would return a table.
You may watch the full video of this tutorial below.
Lastly, I want to share with you one of our tutorials around virtual tables. In this tutorial, I run through a powerful analytical technique to visualize interesting insights inside Power BI. The virtual table algorithms will show how powerful DAX is and how advanced you can get inside of DAX formula. You can expand on this and make it even more advanced.
With virtual tables, you won’t need to always only run calculations and advanced logic through physical columns or tables in your data model. You can create virtual tables and run logic through them even though they do not exist physically in your model. These tables are the fastest way to run advanced logic that can produce great insights in different scenarios.
Here’s the full video tutorial.
Key Take Away
Understanding the different types of Power BI tables and their distinctions is key in using Power BI effectively. This is a fairly straightforward blog post about the topic, and I hope you see clearly the difference between physical tables, calculated tables, and virtual tables.
There’s still a lot of interesting confusion and issues regarding these tables, especially virtual tables and debugging virtual table measures. The Enterprise DNA team is working on more content to help you work with Power BI easily and efficiently.
Check out our website and the links below for more related content.
All the best!
Sam
***** Related Links *****
Creating A Date Table In Power BI The Fastest Way Possible
Power BI Advanced Analytics: Secondary Table Logic Techniques
How To Understand Virtual Tables Inside Iterating Functions In Power BI – DAX Concepts
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Advanced Data Transformations & Modeling
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For more Power BI tables support queries to review see here…..
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