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

Working with DAX in SSAS Tabular

Microsoft added the tabular model to SQL Server Analysis Services with the release of SQL Server 2012. As with Power BI Desktop and Excel Power Pivot, it is an in-memory database that utilizes compression algorithms to store large amounts in memory instead of storing it on disk. This means that, unlike the multidimensional version of SSAS, the tabular model does not require aggregations to be pre-calculated and stored to offer fast, summarized data.

So far, we've looked at how to import data and build data models using Power BI Desktop and Excel Power Pivot. In each case, the data is imported and stored in the host file. While this is fine for limited use, it does make it difficult to share and reuse the data model. With Power BI Desktop, it is at least possible to publish the data model to the Power BI online service. For Excel Power Pivot...