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

Summary

In this chapter, we started off by looking at the DAX date and time group of functions. We looked at how these functions can be used to create a custom date table in our data model, and how they can be used to find out date-related information, such as the number of days between two dates.

We then moved on to look at the time intelligence group of functions. We looked at the three different categories of function available in this group and how they can be used to help us gain further insight into the data held in our data model. We worked through a number of hands-on examples of these functions, using them to return single dates, tables of dates, and learning how to compare values over different time periods.

In the next chapter, we will continue our look at DAX functions by learning about the filter group of functions.