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 learned about row context, query context, and filter context and the role that contexts play in the evaluation of DAX formulas. We have discussed how contexts can be transformed using the CALCULATE function, by removing filters and adding filters to an existing context. In addition, we looked at time intelligence functions, which provide filters specifically tailored to the Gregorian calendar.

We then focused on DAX table functions, which give us the ability to aggregate over tables and the use of custom-made, virtual tables within DAX formulas. Using virtual tables provides a wealth of analytics capabilities on top of what is already possible using "standard" DAX functions and filtering. We talked about the deep connection between tables and filters, which allows for using any table as a filter. And, finally, DAX variables were discussed, which make it easier to implement complex logic in DAX and add to the readability of DAX code as...