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

Extending your data model

The true power of DAX for the BI professional is that it allows you to gain deeper insights into your data by giving you the ability to expand your data model. It allows you to create new data and extract new information from the data that already exists within your data model.

In this section, we're going to look at three different ways in which you can use DAX to extend your data model. By the end, we'll have added some examples of each of the following objects to our data model:

  • Calculated columns
  • Calculated tables
  • Measures

Calculated columns are a very quick and easy way to add data to your model, but they have the disadvantage that they will increase its size and use more memory. Calculated tables will also add to the size of your data model, but they are a great way of adding lookup tables that may be missing from the model's source...