The Definitive Guide to DAX (Business intelligence with Microsoft Excel, SQL Server Analysis Services, and Power BI) is the most comprehensive and authoritative guide to Microsoft’s DAX language for business intelligence and analytics. While other books cover only the basics, this guide offers expert guidance on everything intermediate-to-advanced Excel users and BI professionals need to know, from the basics to innovative high-performance techniques.

Expert Microsoft BI consultants Marco Russo and Alberto Ferrari help you master everything from table functions through advanced code and model optimization. You’ll learn exactly what happens under the hood when you run a DAX expression, and use this knowledge to write fast, robust code. This edition focuses on examples you can build and run with the free Power BI Desktop, and helps you make the most of the powerful syntax of variables (VAR) in Power BI, Excel, or Analysis Services. The authors also show how to optimize data models so DAX expressions will run quickly; demonstrate how to write fast, robust DAX code; and guide you in clearing bottlenecks from existing code. Want to leverage all of DAX’s remarkable capabilities? This no-compromise “deep dive” is exactly what you need.

Book content

1. What is DAX?
2. Introducing DAX
3. Using basic table functions
4. Understanding evaluation contexts
5. Understanding CALCULATE and CALCULATETABLE
6. Variables
7. Working with iterators and with CALCULATE
8. Time intelligence calculations
9. Calculation groups
10. Working with the filter context
11. Handling hierarchies
12. Working with tables
13. Authoring queries
14. Advanced DAX concepts
15. Advanced relationships
16. Advanced calculations in DAX
17. The DAX engines
18. Optimizing VertiPaq
19. Analyzing query plans
20. Optimizing DAX