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 table functions

In the previous section, we focused on those table functions that can be used to manipulate tables. Many of the other table functions fall into the date, time, and time intelligence functions, which we will look at in Chapter 8, Date, Time, and Time Intelligence Functions. The filter functions group also contains a number of table functions, and we'll cover those in Chapter 9, Filter Functions.

For the remainder of this chapter, we'll look at some functions that don't fall into these groups, and where table expressions can be used as parameters. Most of these functions fall into one of the following two categories:

  • Functions that will iterate over the rows returned by the table expression given as a parameter, evaluating a DAX expression for each row of the table.
  • Functions that will look for a specified value, in one or more columns...