Book Image

Hands-On Business Intelligence with DAX

By : Horne
Book Image

Hands-On Business Intelligence with DAX

By: 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

Introduction to date and time functions

The DAX language contains a number of functions relating to date and time, including a couple of functions that allow you to automatically create simple date tables. Many of the remaining date and time functions give you the ability to expand these automatically generated tables with additional columns of date-related information. If you've worked with date and time functions in Excel, then these are very similar, with the exception that DAX date and time functions work with the datetime data type.

Almost all the data models you'll work with will involve some form of calculation relating to date and time, and they'll usually contain at least one date table. In fact, if you are working with a data model in Power BI Desktop and you don't have your own date table, then, by default, it will automatically create a hidden...