Important: This post was written and published in 2019, and the content below may no longer represent the current capabilities of Power BI. Please consider this post to be an historical record and not a technical resource. All content on this site is the personal output of the author and not an official resource from Microsoft.

Last week I kicked off the new BI Polar YouTube channel with a video and blog post comparing and contrasting Power BI dataflows and datasets. In the days that followed, I continued to hear questions that led me to believe I hadn’t done a great job answering one vital question:

When would I use dataflows, and when would I use shared datasets?

Here’s the short answer:

And here’s the long answer: Lego Bricks and the Spectrum of Data Enrichment and Reuse.

The video focuses on – and demonstrates – sharing and reuse with both dataflows and datasets. It’s short and to the point^[1] and focuses on this one question.

The blog post takes a more conceptual view, using Lego bricks as a metaphor for dataflows and datasets and the types of reuse they enable.

If you’ve watched the videos and read the posts and you still have questions, please let me know.

^[1] As short and to the point as anything you’re likely to get from me, anyway. Brevity has never been my forte.