How One Developer Used Power BI to Model Kenya's Crop Data with Star Schemas

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A developer built an interactive Power BI dashboard using a Kenya Crops dataset, exploring three data modelling approaches: flat table, star schema, and snowflake schema. The project began with a single flat table consolidating all farm records — including yield, revenue, cost, and county — into one wide structure for simplicity. While easy to build, the flat table design stores repeated values like county names hundreds of times, making it less efficient as data scales. The developer noted that a star schema, which separates facts from descriptive dimensions, would be a cleaner redesign for future scalability and faster DAX calculations. Power BI Desktop was chosen for its zero-cost entry point and ability to handle large datasets with automatic cloud refresh.

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