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

Functions for parent-child hierarchies

The last group of functions we will look at in this chapter is the one that helps to deal with a parent-child relationship in a table. A common scenario for this is an employee table, where one employee record may be related to another, for example where an employee has a manager.

Figure 6-9 shows the table we will be working with as an example. All employees other than the CEO have a parent employee ID that references their manager's employee ID:

Figure 6-9: The employees table

This can be illustrated by converting it into an organization chart. As you can see in the diagram shown in Figure 6-10, we have a hierarchy that consists of four levels, with the CEO at the top:

Figure 6-10: Organization chart showing employee hierarchy

In this situation, we hit a problem with the Tabular data model. It is simply not possible to create a circular...