Book Image

Extreme DAX

By : Michiel Rozema, Henk Vlootman
Book Image

Extreme DAX

By: Michiel Rozema, Henk Vlootman

Overview of this book

This book helps business analysts generate powerful and sophisticated analyses from their data using DAX and get the most out of Microsoft Business Intelligence tools. Extreme DAX will first teach you the principles of business intelligence, good model design, and how DAX fits into it all. Then, you’ll launch into detailed examples of DAX in real-world business scenarios such as inventory calculations, forecasting, intercompany business, and data security. At each step, senior DAX experts will walk you through the subtleties involved in working with Power BI models and common mistakes to look out for as you build advanced data aggregations. You’ll deepen your understanding of DAX functions, filters, and measures, and how and when they can be used to derive effective insights. You’ll also be provided with PBIX files for each chapter, so that you can follow along and explore in your own time.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Part I: Introduction
6
Part II: Business cases
15
Other Books You May Enjoy
16
Index

Summary

In this chapter, you have seen the different uses of DAX in Power BI models: calculated columns, calculated tables, measures, security rules, and queries. The main takeaway is that DAX measures are (or should be) the primary way of generating valuable results from a model, and indeed, for the majority of the remainder of this book we will focus on DAX measures. We have given you some best practices for working with DAX: avoid calculated columns, use explicit DAX measures, create simple DAX measures and use these as building blocks for more advanced calculations, use measure tables, and hide elements of a model that could confuse the report designer (even if that is yourself).

The next chapter deals with probably the most important concepts to understand when working with DAX: context and filtering. After that, we will be ready to explore advanced DAX business cases in Part 2.