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Doing a Full Outer Join in Power Query

by Koen Verbeeck
on July 2, 2015
in category Business Intelligence

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A while back a give a session at the element61 Microsoft Business

Analytics Day, a free event where the capabilities of   the Microsoft BI
platform is demonstrated alongside client testimonials. I gave a session
called "Drilling across Analysis Services cubes using Power Query", which
talked about how you can use Power Query to do a drill across analysis
over multiple SSAS cubes. Drilling across combines facts from multiple
fact tables through their conformed dimensions, something that is not
possible if your data is split up against multiple cubes. I even wrote an
article about it: Drilling across Analysis Services cubes using Power
Query.

Basically the solution is to create a query for each fact table and then
combine them using the Merge transformation in Power Query, which
basically is a Left or Inner Join. At the end of the session, I got the
question if it's possible to do a Full Outer Join instead, to which my initial
response was "Ehrmmm...". It's not possible through the user interface,
so I gave the advice to create a query that contains the cross join of the
dimensions you want to use, then left join all the fact tables against that
query and at the end filter out any rows where all the facts are empty.
This advice still stands for people who do not want to write a single line of
code in Power Query. However, when reading Chris Webbs excellent book
about Power Query and more specifically the chapter about M, I realized
there is a more elegant solution out there.

In this blog post, I'll use the following data as a source:

You start out just as usual, by creating two queries on top of the
these tables and then merging them together in the user interface.
After clicking OK, you get the following result:

The import part here is the M formula in the formula bar. There is actually
room for a final, optional parameter: JoinKind. If we simply add
JoinKind.FullOuter, we get our desired result.

Image reduced in size to fit your browser, click for original size
Of course, we still have to expand the NewColumn column to retrieve the
Category and the Value from the right input.

 

Image reduced in size to fit your browser, click for original size

And finally we have to do some cosmetics to get a decent presentable

result:

I added the following transformations:

Renaming columns

Adding a custom column taking the left category, unless it is null,

then the right category is taken

Removing the old category columns

Moving columns around

Conclusion

Doing a Full Outer Join in Power Query is really straight forward and you
don't have to be an M guru to adapt the code.

About Koen Verbeeck

Koen Verbeeck is a Microsoft Business Intelligence consultant at element61,
helping clients to get insight in their data. Koen has a comprehensive
knowledge of the SQL Server BI stack, with a particular love for Integration
Services. He's also a speaker at various conferences.

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Author: Koen Verbeeck

Categories: Business Intelligence

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