Because this is the third in the last ten years, and I consider this book special, I want to explain why love reading non-fictional books. I’m generation-reading even if I consider creating my own YouTube channel. Most of the time, I read non-fiction books. I read some books from start to end, and some I consider reference books. When reading a technical book, I can read at my speed, reread a single sentence as often as I want, and ponder each word as long as I want until the words find their place in my tower of thoughts.

As I already mentioned, I consider the book

Pro Power BI Architecture (2nd edition) by Reza Rad

special, not alone because of its mind-boggling volume but mainly because of all the aspects covered in the book.

I consider myself a Power BI expert, but my most important skill is knowing that there are areas in the house called Power BI that I do not know as well as others, and there are chambers that I have not entered until today. This is where this book fits in, it’s one of the books I consider a reference book. Maybe it’s the reference book for Power BI. I use/will use this book to challenge my thinking, refresh my knowledge of areas I feel fading away, and map areas I do not wander each day.

My favorite chapters are

• Datamarts: I constantly reread this chapter when datamarts are part of the discussion.
• The Multi-Layer Architecture: I’m a great fan of the approach, and it helps a lot to cite from a book, not only presenting your slides.
• Paginated Reports: I have to admit this powerful report type is still a myth to me.
• Performance Tuning With Aggregations: Aggregations can help to stay on Pro licensing when your data is growing, but are also an essential feature for performance tuning.
• Big Data with Incremental Refresh and Hybrid Tables: I consider incremental refresh one of the most essential features to speed up data intake to help your datasets grow, but is also the first step into advanced architecture.
• Power BI Admin Portal and Tenant Settings: Tenant settings are essential to keep your data safe and meet governance and regulatory requirements.
• Power BI Audit Log for the Tenant: The audit log is crucial in understanding what’s happening in your Power BI environment and what activities are eating your resources.
• How to Organize Workspaces in a Power BI Environment: Workspaces are so much more than a simple container for all the items forming the analytical solution.

For the record, I mentioned only my 8 favorite chapters. These are my favorite chapters for various reasons. All 44 chapters are a great read.

The book explains everything from tooling to architecture.

This is one of the books a Power BI Sherpa should carry on each journey - I will!

 Thank you, Reza, for putting this book together!