Foreword

You may not know our names. We spend our days writing the code for the software you use in your daily job: We are part of the development team of Power BI, SQL Server Analysis Services, and...yes, we are among the authors of the DAX language and the VertiPaq engine.

The language you are going to learn using this book is our creation. We spent years working on this language, optimizing the engine, finding ways to improve the optimizer, and trying to build DAX into a simple, clean, and sound language to make your life as a data analyst easier and more productive.

But hey, this is intended to be the foreword of a book, so no more about us! Why are we writing a foreword for a book published by Marco and Alberto, the SQLBI guys? Well, because when you start learning DAX, it is a matter of a few clicks and searches on the web before you find articles written by them. You start reading their papers, learning the language, and hopefully appreciating our hard work. Having met them many years ago, we have great admiration for their deep knowledge of SQL Server Analysis Services. When the DAX adventure started, they were among the first to learn and adopt this new engine and language.

The articles, papers, and blog posts they publish and share on the web have become the source of learning for thousands of people. We write the code, but we do not spend much time teaching developers how to use it; Marco and Alberto are the ones who spread the knowledge about DAX.

Alberto and Marco’s books are among a few bestsellers on this topic, and now with this new guide to DAX, they have truly created a milestone publication about the language we author and love. We write the code, they write the books, and you learn DAX, providing unprecedented analytical power to your business. This is what we love: working all together as a team—we, they, and you—to extract better insights from data.

Marius Dumitru, Architect, Power BI CTO’s Office

Cristian Petculescu, Chief Architect of Power BI

Jeffrey Wang, Principal Software Engineer Manager

Christian Wade, Senior Program Manager