Book Image

DAX Cookbook

By : Gregory Deckler
Book Image

DAX Cookbook

By: Gregory Deckler

Overview of this book

DAX provides an extra edge by extracting key information from the data that is already present in your model. Filled with examples of practical, real-world calculations geared toward business metrics and key performance indicators, this cookbook features solutions that you can apply for your own business analysis needs. You'll learn to write various DAX expressions and functions to understand how DAX queries work. The book also covers sections on dates, time, and duration to help you deal with working days, time zones, and shifts. You'll then discover how to manipulate text and numbers to create dynamic titles and ranks, and deal with measure totals. Later, you'll explore common business metrics for finance, customers, employees, and projects. The book will also show you how to implement common industry metrics such as days of supply, mean time between failure, order cycle time and overall equipment effectiveness. In the concluding chapters, you'll learn to apply statistical formulas for covariance, kurtosis, and skewness. Finally, you'll explore advanced DAX patterns for interpolation, inverse aggregators, inverse slicers, and even forecasting with a deseasonalized correlation coefficient. By the end of this book, you'll have the skills you need to use DAX's functionality and flexibility in business intelligence and data analytics.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)

Creating quarters

You may consider it somewhat silly to have a recipe for determining the quarter of a date since quarter is included in the default hierarchy for a date. However, many organizations do not adhere to a standard calendar quarter. For example, Microsoft's fiscal calendar runs from June to May. Other organizations start and stop their quarters on specific dates of the year. This quarter calculation can be used with standard quarterly calendars as well as non-standard quarterly calendars. It is easily modified to fit just about any custom quarterly schedule you can imagine. The quarter table that we will create in this recipe has the following quarters:

  • Q1: August 15 November 14
  • Q2: November 15 February 14
  • Q3: February 15 May 14
  • Q4: May 15 – August 14
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