Do Power BI developers need to learn SQL?

“Do Power BI developers need to learn SQL?”

Most people in the beginning of their Power BI journey ask this question. Many thought leaders in the analytics field have already answered this question through their LinkedIn or other social media posts.

The answer has always a big ‘YES’!

But in this article, I’m going to explain a real scenario that I encountered in my work, where my SQL skills saved the day.

Are you ready to know about it?

A Tricky Requirement

There was a requirement in a Power BI report where the stakeholder wanted to view the historical value of a measure.

This measure goes as SUM(Quantity) with a filter condition ‘Status’ is not equal to ‘X’. The status column value changes dynamically with time for each record.

So, today the measure may have the value ‘Y’, and tomorrow it may change to ‘X’. Hence, using that measure, we will be able to look only at the current Sum of Quantity with the applied filter condition.

But there was no table available in their data warehouse which contained the historical record of this measure. For example, I needed a table such that, on day 1, the measure must have some ‘A’ value, on day 2, some ‘B’ value, and so on. But, it was not available.

Pause for a minute and guess how would you have solved this requirement.

Well, here’s what I did

• I created a new table (using SQL) with 2 columns, one for measure value and the other for the DateTime on which the query was executed.
• Using my SQL skills (of course with some help from the Web), I wrote a query that will provide me these 2 values and get inserted into the new table as a record.
• The next step was to make sure that this query was executed once every day at a specified time. Note that the data warehouse was located in the cloud.
• Hence, I needed an automation tool that will ensure that this can seamlessly happen. Here comes Power Automate to the rescue.
• I used Power Automate to schedule this query to get executed at a specified time on each day.

Now, I had the table required to develop the visual requested by the stakeholder and imported that in Power BI to close the requirement!

By now, you would have understood that as a Power BI developer, in the long run, it’s always essential to learn other helpful tools such as SQL, Excel, Power Automate, etc.

I hope this article provides a better picture on why SQL is important for any data analyst/BI developer.

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