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

Working with DAX Patterns

In this chapter, we're going to look at the concept of DAX patterns. As with other software design patterns, a DAX pattern consists of a template that forms the basis of a reusable solution to a commonly encountered problem.

We'll start with an introduction to the Quick Measures feature in Power BI Desktop. As the name suggests, this is a quick and easy way to create a DAX measure, without needing to know any DAX code. Behind the scenes, it uses predefined DAX patterns that are completed using the responses you provide through the Quick Measures dialog.

Having explored how the Quick Measures feature works, we'll look at some examples of the measures that are available by using them with hands-on examples.

The chapter is broken into the following sections:

  • Introducing Power BI Quick Measures
  • Calculating cumulative totals
  • Binning data using...