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

Summary

In this chapter, we learned about creating measures and columns, following the software engineering principle of coding patterns, and how they can turn your DAX code into templates for more reliable and reusable solutions.

We started with an introduction to the Quick Measures feature in Power BI Desktop. We looked at how this feature can be used as a quick and easy way to create DAX measures, without needing to know any DAX code. We saw how it uses predefined DAX patterns that are modified using the responses provided through the Quick Measures dialog.

Having explored the Quick Measures feature, we looked at examples of DAX patterns being used in a number of different areas, including some of those created by using Quick Measures.

In the next chapter, we'll start our look at performance and optimization, starting with a look at how we can optimize our data models...