Book Image

Tabular Modeling with SQL Server 2016 Analysis Services Cookbook

By : Derek Wilson
Book Image

Tabular Modeling with SQL Server 2016 Analysis Services Cookbook

By: Derek Wilson

Overview of this book

SQL Server Analysis Service (SSAS) has been widely used across multiple businesses to build smart online analytical reporting solutions. It includes two different types of modeling for analysis services: Tabular and Multi Dimensional. This book covers Tabular modeling, which uses tables and relationships with a fast in-memory engine to provide state of the art compression algorithms and query performance. The book begins by quickly taking you through the concepts required to model tabular data and set up the necessary tools and services. As you learn to create tabular models using tools such as Excel and Power View, you’ll be shown various strategies to deploy your model on the server and choose a query mode (In-memory or DirectQuery) that best suits your reporting needs. You’ll also learn how to implement key and newly introduced DAX functions to create calculated columns and measures for your model data. Last but not least, you’ll be shown techniques that will help you administer and secure your BI implementation along with some widely used tips and tricks to optimize your reporting solution. By the end of this book, you’ll have gained hands-on experience with the powerful new features that have been added to Tabular models in SSAS 2016 and you’ll be able to improve user satisfaction with faster reports and analytical queries.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Tabular Modeling with SQL Server 2016 Analysis Services Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Using the WEEKDAY function


The WEEKDAY function returns the day of the week as an integer. The week starts with Sunday as 1. Using this function, you can include information in your model to indicate workdays and weekends. Also you can create analysis that reviews trends on performance based on the day of the week. For example, do more crashes occur on Fridays than Tuesdays?

How to do it...

  1. Open the Model.bim to the Calc_Date_T table.

  2. In the measure creation area, click on an empty cell to create a measure to return the day of the week as an integer:

            DayofWeek:=WEEKDAY("1/1/2016") 
    

  3. January 1st 2016 is a friday and the result returned is a 6.

  4. To make this more beneficial to users, you can convert the number to the name of the day:

            DayofWeekName:=FORMAT(WEEKDAY("1/1/2016"),"DDDD") 
    

How it works...

This function takes a date as an argument and returns the day of the week as an integer. You can use this function to find dates that are weekday values (2-6) and weekend values...