Power BI and SQL Reporting

A report is only useful if people can trust its numbers. This course teaches reporting as two halves of one job. The **SQL half is fully hands-on**: you work in **PostgreSQL 16** against `meridian`, a synthetic sales-and-support star schema for a fictional outdoor-gear retailer, and write the queries and views that a dashboard reads — aggregations and grouping, window functions for running totals, period-over-period and cohorts, reporting views, and the query-performance techniques (indexes, materialized views) that keep a dashboard fast. Every query in these lessons was executed against PostgreSQL 16 and the output you see is the output that was observed. The **Power BI half is taught as concepts and a worked specification**. Power BI Desktop is a free Microsoft application, but it runs only on Windows and the terms for a paid hosted-classroom lab are still being confirmed, so this course does **not** claim to host a Power BI lab. Instead it teaches the ideas precisely — Get Data and Power Query/M, the data model and relationships, DAX measures and time intelligence, visual choice and honest report design, refresh, parameters, publishing and row-level security — with correct DAX, clearly labelled `[SCREENSHOT: ...]` placeholders, and a downloadable `.pbix` specification you build. If you want to follow along hands-on, install free Power BI Desktop on your own Windows machine and connect it to the same SQL source. The final project ties the halves together: you build the SQL reporting layer for a described business (validated views, executed against PostgreSQL) and a documented Power BI report specification (model, DAX measures, visuals), with a validation note that reconciles the report's headline numbers to the SQL source. You finish able to reason about where a number comes from and prove it.