Importing small slices of a dimensional model

[Anonymous]

Hi, this might be a dumb question, but I haven't figured out how to do something that should be pretty easy in Power BI desktop. Let's say I'm connecting to a star schema database, and it contains the following:

Dim Department

Dim Date

Dim Person

Fact Sales

What I would like to be able to do is import the tables into Power BI desktop, but only pick a single department and/or a small number of departments. Based on this, I also want Fact Sales to be filtered on only the rows that are in that department, and I want Dim Person to likewise only contain the rows that match to the corresponding Fact Sales.

This is a made up example, but we have fact tables that contain billions of rows, and I need to filter those down before the come in to Power BI.

And one additional requirement - I do NOT want to have to write SQL to do this. I'm perfectly comfortable doing so...but many of our end users throughout the org aren't - nor should they be required to do this.

Is there a simple way to do this?

Thanks,

Scott

[v-chuncz-msft]

@Anonymous,

You may try the connect live mode.

[Anonymous]

Hi Sam,

not really wanting to do live connections, as the performance may be quite poor...I really am looking at importing the data. At some point in the future we may stand up SSAS tabular, at which point live connections vs. querying should be feasible...but for right now I'm really quite surprised that there doesn't seem to be an easy way to import just a slice of a basic star schema model.

Thanks,

Scott