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

Summary

In this chapter, you learned about why it is important to build a well-defined data model. Not only does it make it easier to understand and report from as an end user, but it also makes it easier to work with as a BI professional by making the execution of DAX code easier to understand. From here, you learned about a couple of different schema designs with the star and snowflake shaped schemas. You also learned about some important data modeling concepts that you then put into practice by building a simple data model using hands-on examples.

Then, you looked at how to load data and create relationships and how to use DAX functions to extend your data model by creating calculated columns, calculated tables, and measures. Finally, you learned how to extend your data model further by adding a custom date table to it using the CALENDAR function.

In the next chapter, we&apos...