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

Optimizing Your Data Model

In Chapter 3, Building Data Models, we looked at the importance of building a well-structured data model. In this chapter, we'll take the practice of data modeling one step further by learning about some of the techniques behind data model optimization. As a tabular data model resides in random-access memory (RAM), reducing its memory requirement is a major consideration in the overall design process.

We will start this chapter with an introduction to the VertiPaq compression engine. We'll look at what it is and how it works, and how this knowledge can help when it comes to optimizing the data in our data models. We'll investigate data profiling and how this can help identify what sort of data we should include in our data models, and we'll look at some of the tools available that can help with this process.

Then, we'll learn...