Project Requirements & Architecture for Intermediate Level

At the intermediate level, business intelligence engineering transitions from ad-hoc charts to enterprise reporting architecture. In real organizations, business executives do not care simply about pretty visuals; they rely on data models to track quarterly KPIs, monitor financial burn rates, identify high-risk customer churn, and enforce strict departmental security.

1. Enterprise Business Requirements Specification

Every professional Power BI project starts with a Business Requirements Document (BRD). Below are the five mandatory architectural standards required for all intermediate projects:

2. The Star Schema Mandate

The number one reason Power BI reports become sluggish, inaccurate, or fail to calculate correctly is the use of a single flat table or an unstructured "spider-web" schema.

Star Schema Architecture

A star schema separates data into two distinct table types:

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   Fact Tables (Center of the Star):

• Contain numerical metrics, quantitative measurements, and transactional events (e.g., SalesAmount, QuantitySold, DiscountAmount).
• Possess high row counts and foreign keys (CustomerID, ProductID, DateKey).

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   Dimension Tables (Points of the Star):

• Contain descriptive business context used for slicing, dicing, and grouping (e.g., CustomerName, ProductCategory, CalendarYear).
• Possess primary keys with unique, distinct values.

3. Dataset Architecture for Intermediate Projects

Throughout this course, you will work with real business datasets stored in public/downloads/datasets/:

• superstore_sales_analytics.csv: Contains multi-region retail orders with dimensions for Customer Segment, Category, and Shipping Modes.
• customer_churn_telecom.csv: Contains telecommunication customer retention records with monthly fees, tenure, and payment channels.
• retail_store_database.sql: A complete 4-table relational database for direct query and ETL pipelines.

4. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to Implement

Your intermediate models will implement industry-standard corporate KPIs: