Modern Data Modelling Setup
This is a step-by-step guide to setting up the tools for modern data modelling. Firstly we set up for building Power BI models then for AI assistance.
Agenda
Overview - What we need
For the course, attendees will need to install some or all of the following software. Don’t worry if you don’t have access to all of these.
- A laptop - either a PC (preferred) or a Mac.
- Power BI Desktop installed (PC only) or Power BI Online access (Mac).
- A GitHub.com account (free to create).
- A Claude account (free to create).
- The Power BI Modeling MCP server. This allows an AI to inspect and change a Power BI model.
- VSCode, a free popular editor that can we can use to install this MCP server.
We can use either GitHub Copilot Chat (within VSCode) or Claude Desktop as our AI agent. GitHub Copilot Chat is quicker and easier to get started with. We have to create a free GitHub.com account to be able to use GitHub Copilot Chat but this is easy to do. Claude Desktop is harder to set up but it is the better AI model. We will set up GitHub Copilot first then Claude.
Heads up - there will be some challenges, and we will solve them together
Set up is hard and we can expect some challenges along the way.
- Attendees will have both personal and work laptops, and work laptops will have fewer permissions and different methods to install software.
- There will be different versions especially of Power BI Desktop and attendees will have different or perhaps no Power BI license.
- Attendees may have already have accounts for GitHub, Claude and other tools.
- We are relying on free cloud services to provide the AI assistance and these are not always reliable.
- There will be security challenges: passwords, passkeys, two factor authentication, SMS codes, authenticator codes,…
The final part of the session is to solve attendees problems.