Analyst in Action

Good to be back after a short break. This is a topic I’ve personally been wanting to explore, understanding  why  and  when  we actually need different environments in Power BI. If you’re currently questioning whether it’s time to move toward Dev, Test, and Prod, this one’s for you. Let’s break it down. Imagine you’re cooking for yourself at home. You experiment freely, adjust as you go, and if the dish isn’t perfect, it’s not a big deal. Now imagine you’re cooking for a wedding with 300 guests. You don’t experiment during service. You test recipes beforehand, prepare in stages, and control every step before it reaches the table. Power BI environments work the same way. When your BI setup is small and lightly used, working directly in a single production workspace feels efficient. Changes are quick, feedback is immediate, and even if something breaks, the impact is limited. But Power BI rarely stays small. As more developers get involved, semantic models are reused a...

" When is it time to stop copying PBIX files and start reusing a shared model?" Most BI developers begin their Power BI journey the same way: one PBIX file that does absolutely everything. It holds the data model, the queries, the measures, and all the report pages on top. It’s simple, self-contained, and easy to understand. That's normal, no? Yes, absolutely, but let's imagine a scenario where there are different teams, and they want the same dataset but tweaked in a different way for their purpose. Since your semantic model is quite big in terms of size. Generally, you can just make the adjustments and create multiple PBIX files for different audiences. This solution will work, but let's understand what we are doing. After a few months, what started as one neat, well-understood PBIX turns into a small family of very similar files: Multiple PBIX files containing almost the same model KPIs that should mean the same thing but don’t quite match A growing fear that c...