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

Optimizing Your DAX Queries

For the last chapter in this book, we are going to look at some of the techniques and tools you can use to analyze DAX query performance and identify potential problems.

We will start this chapter by learning about the storage engine and the formula engine. These are the two engines that are used to resolve DAX queries. We'll look at how these engines work together to retrieve data from the data model and return a result. We'll also learn how this knowledge can help to identify and resolve performance issues with DAX queries.

We will then look at some of the tools we can use to investigate the performance of DAX queries. These include DAX Studio, the SQL Server Profiler, and the Performance Analyzer feature in Power BI Desktop. We'll learn how to use these tools and how they can help to find potential bottlenecks and performance issues...