Hands-On Business Intelligence with DAX

Book Description

Implement business intelligence, data modeling, and data analytics within Microsoft products such as Power BI, SQL Server, and Excel.

Key Features

• Learn the in-and-out of DAX expressions and querying functions using easy-to-follow examples
• Manipulate different complexity of data and optimize BI workflows to extract key insights
• Create, monitor, and improve the performance of models by writing clean and robust DAX queries

Book Description

DAX provides an extra edge by extracting key information from the data that is already present in your model. With this book, you will leverage DAX’s functionality and flexibility in the business intelligence and data analytics domain.

You’ll start from the basics of DAX, along with the importance of good data models, and how to write efficient DAX formulas by using variables and good formatting. You will understand how DAX queries work using an example-based approach. You will learn to optimize the BI workflow by writing efficient and powerful DAX queries with easy-to-follow explanations and examples. You will learn to manipulate and load different complexity of data within various Microsoft’s products like Power BI, SQL Server, and Excel Power Pivot. You will learn to build and extend your data models to gain additional insights. Later you will delve into progressive DAX syntax and functions to understand complex relationships in DAX. You will cover important DAX functions, specifically those related to tables, date and time, filtering, and statistics. You will then move on to more progressive topics such as how the formula and storage engines work to be able to optimize your queries.

By the end of this book, you will be able to employ DAX to enhance your data model by extracting new information and gaining deeper insights.

What you will learn

• Learn DAX from the basics through to a progressive level, and how to build effective data models
• Write and use DAX functions and expressions with the help of hands-on examples
• Effectively handle errors in your DAX code, and avoid unwanted results
• Load data into a data model using Power BI, Excel Power Pivot and SSAS Tabular
• Cover DAX functions such as date, time and time intelligence using example code
• Gain deeper insights into data by using DAX to create new information
• Understand the DAX VertiPaq engine and how it can help you to optimize the data model

Who This Book Is For

This book is for data analysts, business analysts, BI developers, or any SQL users who want to bring the best use of DAX in BI and data analytics domain using an example-rich guide. You will learn to use DAX query in Power BI, Excel and SQL Server for carrying out efficient analysis. Some understanding of BI concepts is mandatory.

Table of contents

Section 1: Introduction to DAX for the BI Pro
Section 2: Understanding DAX Functions and Syntax
Section 3: Taking DAX to the Next Level

About The Author

Ian Horne