Semantic Models

Introduction to Microsoft Fabric

Alex Kuntz

Technical Instructional Designer

BI Developers

  • Build user-friendly reports
  • Need a combination of business acumen and data skills
  • Often use tools like Power BI

A Power BI report

Introduction to Microsoft Fabric

New semantic models

  • Creating a semantic model in the Fabric interface

The interface to create a new semantic model

Introduction to Microsoft Fabric

What is a semantic model?

A diagram of the customer, product, and salesperson data

  • Organizes data by defining relationships
  • For example, consider data about sales at a company
    • Table with customer data
    • Table with salesperson data
    • Table with product data
  • Without a semantic model, these tables exist independently. There is no relationship between the tables
Introduction to Microsoft Fabric

Semantic model relationships

  • Semantic models formally define relationships between tables

Diagram showing the customer, salesperson, and product tables with relationships between them

Introduction to Microsoft Fabric

Star schemas

A Star Schema diagram. The central Sales table is in the middle with connections to other tables like customer, salesperson, and product

1 https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/fabric/data-warehouse/dimensional-modeling-overview
Introduction to Microsoft Fabric

Other semantic model features

  • Define measures and calculation groups
    • Useful when you have a calculation that you will perform often
  • Roles for access management

measures_and_calculations.png

Introduction to Microsoft Fabric

Default Semantic Model

  • A default semantic model is created when you create a lakehouse
  • Need to adjust settings of the default model to ensure it is updated as you add more data to your lakehouse

The default semantic model is created when a lakehouse is created

Introduction to Microsoft Fabric

Let's practice!

Introduction to Microsoft Fabric

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