Forum Discussion

Copper Contributor

Jul 02, 2018

Solved

Use cases for the multiple ways to "get data"

Hi all, I was wondering if someone can clarify when to use these methods of loading data from SQL Server in Excel 2016 (maybe there is no difference) For example, I can use one of these three...

BI & Data Analytics

get and transform data

SergeiBaklan
Jul 03, 2018
Hi,

IMHO, better to use Get & Transform to query SQL server. You may use SQL query and/or transform data using Power Query, load result to data model and add measures and relationships with other sources if necessary.

Loading directly from Data Model is less flexible, option 2) looks like outdated.

SergeiBaklan

Diamond Contributor

Jul 03, 2018

Hi,

IMHO, better to use Get & Transform to query SQL server. You may use SQL query and/or transform data using Power Query, load result to data model and add measures and relationships with other sources if necessary.

Loading directly from Data Model is less flexible, option 2) looks like outdated.

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Copper Contributor
Jul 03, 2018
Hi Sergei,

Thank you for the response - very helpful. It looks to me like there are redundant methods of acquiring data, but it's not really clear which method is the best for each use case. Perhaps the outdated methods are retained if users are familiar with them, but in this case I wasn't clear which method aligned best with SQL Server, and your answer cleared that up for me!