Book Image

Hands-On Business Intelligence with DAX

By : Ian Horne
Book Image

Hands-On Business Intelligence with DAX

By: Ian Horne

Overview of this book

Data Analysis Expressions (DAX) is known for its ability to increase efficiency by extracting new information from data that is already present in your model. With this book, you’ll learn to use DAX’s functionality and flexibility in the BI and data analytics domains. You’ll start by learning the basics of DAX, along with understanding the importance of good data models, and how to write efficient DAX formulas by using variables and formatting styles. You’ll then explore how DAX queries work with the help of examples. The book will guide you through optimizing the BI workflow by writing powerful DAX queries. Next, you’ll learn to manipulate and load data of varying complexity within Microsoft products such as Power BI, SQL Server, and Excel Power Pivot. You’ll then discover how to build and extend your data models to gain additional insights, before covering progressive DAX syntax and functions to understand complex relationships in DAX. Later, you’ll focus on important DAX functions, specifically those related to tables, date and time, filtering, and statistics. Finally, you’ll delve into advanced topics such as how the formula and storage engines work to optimize queries. By the end of this book, you’ll have gained hands-on experience in employing DAX to enhance your data models by extracting new information and gaining deeper insights.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
1
Section 1: Introduction to DAX for the BI Pro
7
Section 2: Understanding DAX Functions and Syntax
14
Section 3: Taking DAX to the Next Level

Date, Time, and Time Intelligence Functions

We'll start this chapter by looking at the group of DAX functions that deal with date and time. Starting with a brief description of each of the functions currently available in this group, we'll then turn our attention to some hands-on examples.

In the second half of this chapter, we'll be working with the time intelligence group of functions. Again, we'll start with a list of the functions in this group, before moving on to look at how these functions work with a date table in your data model to bring you new insights. We'll also work through some examples of using these functions to aggregate and compare data over different time periods.

This chapter will cover the following topics:

  • Introduction to date and time functions
  • Working with date and time functions
  • Looking at time intelligence functions
  • Making your...