Partial book profile
Pro DAX with Power BI Business Intelligence with PowerPivot and SQL Server Analysis Services Tabular
Philip Seamark, Thomas Martens
A practitioner's deep dive into mastering the DAX language within Power BI by understanding its underlying mechanics, evaluation contexts, data modeling foundations, and performance optimization.
The full book profile is not available yet.
What it’s about
Pro DAX with Power BI demystifies the 'dark art' of DAX by treating it as a learnable craft rather than a mystical language. Authors Philip Seamark and Thomas Martens strip DAX down to its moving parts—the tabular database engine, data model relationships, filter and row contexts, and column lineage—and rebuild the reader's understanding from the ground up. Through worked examples using the Wide World Importers dataset, the book progresses from foundational mechanics through core concepts like filtering, iterators, and context transition, then applies these to advanced everyday problems such as time intelligence, finding missing events, dynamic reporting, and row-level security. Finally, it equips readers with debugging and optimization tools including DAX Studio and Query Plans, plus techniques to scale small models to millions of rows. It is the ideal companion for analysts who can already write basic measures but hit walls when calculations return unexpected results or perform poorly.
The through-line
- Who it’s for
- A Power BI analyst or developer who can write basic measures and calculated columns but wants to master advanced DAX to solve real-world reporting and performance problems.
- The problem
- DAX calculations return unexpected or wrong results, perform slowly, or fail to solve advanced reporting requirements. The reader feels DAX is a mysterious 'dark art' beyond their skills and fears they lack the aptitude to become a 'DAX ninja'.
- The plan
- Learn the foundational mechanics of DAX, the tabular database, and data modeling.
- Master core concepts: filter and row contexts, filtering, iterators, and lineage.
- Apply DAX to advanced everyday problems like time intelligence, missing data, and row-level security.
- Use DAX Studio and Query Plans to debug and optimize calculations.
- Scale and test models to ensure correctness and performance at volume.
- The payoff
- The reader writes correct, efficient DAX with confidence. · They design proper star schema models that simplify calculations. · They debug and optimize slow queries using DAX Studio and Query Plans.
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