Reza Rad

Any data analytics solution requires data population and preparation. With the rise of data analytics solutions these years, the need for this data preparation becomes even more essential. Power BI is a helpful data analytics tool that is used worldwide by many users.
As a Power BI (or Microsoft BI) developer, it is essential to learn how to prepare the data in the right shape and format needed. You need to learn how to clean the data and build it in the structure that can be modeled easily… Show more

Any data analytics solution requires data population and preparation. With the rise of data analytics solutions these years, the need for this data preparation becomes even more essential. Power BI is a helpful data analytics tool that is used worldwide by many users.
As a Power BI (or Microsoft BI) developer, it is essential to learn how to prepare the data in the right shape and format needed. You need to learn how to clean the data and build it in the structure that can be modeled easily and used high performant for visualization.
Data preparation and transformation is the backend work. If you consider building a BI system as going to a restaurant and ordering food. The visualization is the food you see on the table nicely presented. The quality, the taste, and everything else comes from the hard work in the kitchen. The part that you don’t see or the backend in the world of Power BI is Power Query.
You may be already familiar with some other data preparation and data transformation technologies, such as T-SQL, SSIS, Azure Data Factory, Informatica, etc. Power Query is a data transformation engine capable of preparing the data in the format you need. The good news is that to learn Power Query; you don’t need to know programming. Power Query is for citizen data engineers. However, this doesn’t mean that Power Query is not capable of performing advanced transformation.
Unfortunately, because Power Query and data preparation is the kitchen work of the BI system, many Power BI users skip the learning of it and become aware of it somewhere along their BI project. Once they get familiar with it, they realize there are tons of things they could have implemented easier, faster, and in a much more maintainable way using Power Query. In other words, they learn mastering Power Query is the key skill toward mastering Power BI. Show less

A good analytics solution combines a good data model, good data preparation, and good analytics and calculations. Reza has written another book about the Basics of modeling in Power BI and a book on Power BI DAX Simplified. This book is covering the data preparation and transformations aspects of it.
This book series is for you if you are building a Power BI solution. Even if you are just visualizing the data, preparation and transformations are an essential part of analytics. You do need to… Show more

A good analytics solution combines a good data model, good data preparation, and good analytics and calculations. Reza has written another book about the Basics of modeling in Power BI and a book on Power BI DAX Simplified. This book is covering the data preparation and transformations aspects of it.
This book series is for you if you are building a Power BI solution. Even if you are just visualizing the data, preparation and transformations are an essential part of analytics. You do need to have the cleaned and prepared data ready before visualizing it.
This book is compiled into a series of two books, which will be followed by a third book later;
Getting started with Power Query in Power BI and Excel (already available to be purchased separately)
Mastering Power Query in Power BI and Excel (This book)
Power Query dataflows (will be published later)
This book deeps dive into real-world challenges of data transformation. It starts with combining data sources and continues with aggregations and fuzzy operations. The book covers advanced usage of Power Query in scenarios such as error handling and exception reports, custom functions and parameters, advanced analytics, and some helpful table and list functions. The book continues with some performance tuning tips and it also explains the Power Query formula language (M) and the structure of it and how to use it in practical solutions.
Although this book is written for Power BI and all the examples are presented using the Power BI. However, the examples can be easily applied to Excel, Dataflows, and other tools and services using Power Query. Show less

DAX is the language of data analysis in Microsoft Power BI, Azure Analysis Services, and Excel Power Pivot. DAX is a powerful language that can quickly empower you to analyze year-over-year or rolling 12 months calculations. It is rare to find an analytics solution using Microsoft technologies (especially Power BI) that doesn’t require some calculations to be written by DAX.
As a Power BI (or Microsoft BI) developer, it is essential to learn this language and master it. Learning a language… Show more

DAX is the language of data analysis in Microsoft Power BI, Azure Analysis Services, and Excel Power Pivot. DAX is a powerful language that can quickly empower you to analyze year-over-year or rolling 12 months calculations. It is rare to find an analytics solution using Microsoft technologies (especially Power BI) that doesn’t require some calculations to be written by DAX.
As a Power BI (or Microsoft BI) developer, it is essential to learn this language and master it. Learning a language is not just learning the structure and functions. It is learning how, where, and when to use it so that you can solve real-world problems with it.
In my training and consulting experience on Power BI, I realized that DAX is the weak point for many Power BI users. DAX itself is not a complex language. It is merely a language of expression. The complexity of learning DAX is not the formula or the functions. It is how to use it in real-world scenarios and how it performs on a dataset or visual.
I have been writing many blogs about DAX for many years. My blog articles are all coming from my experience working with Power BI. I found it helpful to compile them all in a book. Because my blog articles practically explain things, I thought it better to title it as a practical way of learning DAX by examples.
Indeed, there are books, articles, and Microsoft documentation on how each function works where and how. However, learning these through an example would bring a new way of understanding it.
A good analytics solution is a combined outcome of a good data model, good data preparation, and good analytics and calculations. I have written another book about the Basics of modeling in Power BI. This book is covering the calculation and DAX aspects of it.
This book is for you if you are building a Power BI solution. Even if you are just visualizing the data, calculations are an essential part of analytics. You do need to have the calculation ready before visualizing it. Show less

I have been dealing with many Power BI challenges in my professional life as a Power BI consultant and a trainer. Challenges normally come as calculation or DAX questions, or sometimes as a performance question. However, after digging deeper into the problem, soon, it will be revealed that the problem is related to a more fundamental challenge; data modeling.If you have a Power BI implementation with many calculation-related or performance-related issues, I strongly suggest looking into your… Show more

I have been dealing with many Power BI challenges in my professional life as a Power BI consultant and a trainer. Challenges normally come as calculation or DAX questions, or sometimes as a performance question. However, after digging deeper into the problem, soon, it will be revealed that the problem is related to a more fundamental challenge; data modeling.If you have a Power BI implementation with many calculation-related or performance-related issues, I strongly suggest looking into your data model because that is where most of the problems start.A good data model is a great base, which upon that, you can build up many stories of calculations and analysis. A bad data model causes problems on every level that you add upon it, and might sometime cause the whole solution to collapse.Fortunately, data modeling is not rocket science. I explained the basic principles of the data modeling with examples in this book. Use this book as the learning path towards a better data model. Most of the tips mentioned in this book are product-agnostic (such as star-schema, dimension, and fact tables). However, this book is particularly designed and developed for a Power BI product user.This book is for you if you are building a Power BI solution. If your task is only visualizing the existing data, this book might not be needed for you. However, What I have seen in many cases, is that the requirement starts with just visualize the data, and then more data tables appear, and you get into the tunnel of data modeling without knowing the principles of it. This book is a guide for you through that tunnel. Show less

I have been writing and presenting about Row-Level Security in Power BI for many years. Through the comments and feedback I got from my presentations and articles, I felt a need for a place to have everything gathered in one place. The lack of a book that explains everything about the current subject motivated me to end up gathering all my articles in this book. The result is what you are reading.
Row-Level Security in Power BI is not about sharing your content. It is, on the other hand… Show more

I have been writing and presenting about Row-Level Security in Power BI for many years. Through the comments and feedback I got from my presentations and articles, I felt a need for a place to have everything gathered in one place. The lack of a book that explains everything about the current subject motivated me to end up gathering all my articles in this book. The result is what you are reading.
Row-Level Security in Power BI is not about sharing your content. It is, on the other hand, about sharing the same content with a different audience in the way that they see different views of the data. They will have different access to the data. Some of them might see the entire data, and some others might see part of the data that they are authorized to see.
Instead of creating multiple reports with the same format, fields, calculations, and visualizations, and only making them different in filtering, the correct way to do it is through row-level security. This will make sure you have the maximum consistency and minimum maintenance for your Power BI project.
This is not a book about theories. This is a hands-on book. There are tons of demos and examples with the code samples that you can try. You will learn through this book, what is row-level security. You will learn different types of security and patterns in which you will see the most common challenges for implementing the security and the solution to save them.
The book starts with the basics of row-level security, then you will learn about static vs. dynamic row-level security. You will learn patterns such as everyone see their own data, but the manager sees a different view or users and profiles for branch managers. Or the organizational hierarchy, or even the many-to-many relationship challenge of row-level security etc. through this book. Show less

The Power BI from Rookie to Rock Star been such a popular book from the time that it published, and I added content to it every single week. After edition 3 which released July 2017, there have been many contents added. The edition 3 itself was more than 1100 pages, and If I wanted to continue the book as an all-in-one, it would have been more than 1700 pages altogether now. So I decided to break the book into a book series. Each book in this series is a complete book and can be read… Show more

The Power BI from Rookie to Rock Star been such a popular book from the time that it published, and I added content to it every single week. After edition 3 which released July 2017, there have been many contents added. The edition 3 itself was more than 1100 pages, and If I wanted to continue the book as an all-in-one, it would have been more than 1700 pages altogether now. So I decided to break the book into a book series. Each book in this series is a complete book and can be read individually. However, each book covers a specific area of the Power BI, and if you want to learn Power BI from ground zero to sky hero, you would need to read them all. Here is the new structure:

Edition 4: 7th of Jan 2019. Total number of pages (all books together): ~1700 pages

Book 1: Power BI Essentials
Book 2: Visualization with Power BI
Book 3: Power Query and Data Transformation in Power BI
Book 4: Power BI Data Modelling and DAX
Book 5: Pro Power BI Architecture (Apress) Show less

The Power BI from Rookie to Rock Star been such a popular book from the time that it published, and I added content to it every single week. After edition 3 which released July 2017, there have been many contents added. The edition 3 itself was more than 1100 pages, and If I wanted to continue the book as an all-in-one, it would have been more than 1700 pages altogether now. So I decided to break the book into a book series. Each book in this series is a complete book and can be read… Show more

The Power BI from Rookie to Rock Star been such a popular book from the time that it published, and I added content to it every single week. After edition 3 which released July 2017, there have been many contents added. The edition 3 itself was more than 1100 pages, and If I wanted to continue the book as an all-in-one, it would have been more than 1700 pages altogether now. So I decided to break the book into a book series. Each book in this series is a complete book and can be read individually. However, each book covers a specific area of the Power BI, and if you want to learn Power BI from ground zero to sky hero, you would need to read them all. Here is the new structure:

Edition 4: 7th of Jan 2019. Total number of pages (all books together): ~1700 pages

Book 1: Power BI Essentials
Book 2: Visualization with Power BI
Book 3: Power Query and Data Transformation in Power BI
Book 4: Power BI Data Modelling and DAX
Book 5: Pro Power BI Architecture (Apress) Show less

The Power BI from Rookie to Rock Star been such a popular book from the time that it published, and I added content to it every single week. After edition 3 which released July 2017, there have been many contents added. The edition 3 itself was more than 1100 pages, and If I wanted to continue the book as an all-in-one, it would have been more than 1700 pages altogether now. So I decided to break the book into a book series. Each book in this series is a complete book and can be read… Show more

The Power BI from Rookie to Rock Star been such a popular book from the time that it published, and I added content to it every single week. After edition 3 which released July 2017, there have been many contents added. The edition 3 itself was more than 1100 pages, and If I wanted to continue the book as an all-in-one, it would have been more than 1700 pages altogether now. So I decided to break the book into a book series. Each book in this series is a complete book and can be read individually. However, each book covers a specific area of the Power BI, and if you want to learn Power BI from ground zero to sky hero, you would need to read them all. Here is the new structure:

Edition 4: 7th of Jan 2019. Total number of pages (all books together): ~1700 pages

Book 1: Power BI Essentials
Book 2: Visualization with Power BI
Book 3: Power Query and Data Transformation in Power BI
Book 4: Power BI Data Modelling and DAX
Book 5: Pro Power BI Architecture (Apress) Show less

The Power BI from Rookie to Rock Star been such a popular book from the time that it published, and I added content to it every single week. After edition 3 which released July 2017, there have been many contents added. The edition 3 itself was more than 1100 pages, and If I wanted to continue the book as an all-in-one, it would have been more than 1700 pages altogether now. So I decided to break the book into a book series. Each book in this series is a complete book and can be read… Show more

The Power BI from Rookie to Rock Star been such a popular book from the time that it published, and I added content to it every single week. After edition 3 which released July 2017, there have been many contents added. The edition 3 itself was more than 1100 pages, and If I wanted to continue the book as an all-in-one, it would have been more than 1700 pages altogether now. So I decided to break the book into a book series. Each book in this series is a complete book and can be read individually. However, each book covers a specific area of the Power BI, and if you want to learn Power BI from ground zero to sky hero, you would need to read them all. Here is the new structure:

Edition 4: 7th of Jan 2019. Total number of pages (all books together): ~1700 pages

Book 1: Power BI Essentials
Book 2: Visualization with Power BI
Book 3: Power Query and Data Transformation in Power BI
Book 4: Power BI Data Modelling and DAX
Book 5: Pro Power BI Architecture (Apress) Show less

Architect and deploy a Power BI solution. This book will help you understand the many available options and choose the best combination for hosting, developing, sharing, and deploying a Power BI solution within your organization.
Pro Power BI Architecture provides detailed examples and explains the different methods available for sharing and securing Power BI content so that only intended recipients can see it. Commonly encountered problems you will learn to handle include content… Show more

Architect and deploy a Power BI solution. This book will help you understand the many available options and choose the best combination for hosting, developing, sharing, and deploying a Power BI solution within your organization.
Pro Power BI Architecture provides detailed examples and explains the different methods available for sharing and securing Power BI content so that only intended recipients can see it. Commonly encountered problems you will learn to handle include content unexpectedly changing while users are in the process of creating reports and building analysis, methods of sharing analyses that don’t cover all the requirements of your business or organization, and inconsistent security models.
The knowledge provided in this book will allow you to choose an architecture and deployment model that suits the needs of your organization, ensuring that you do not spend your time maintaining your solution but on using it for its intended purpose and gaining business value from mining and analyzing your organization’s data.
What You'll Learn

Architect and administer enterprise-level Power BI solutions
Choose the right sharing method for your Power BI solution
Create and manage environments for development, testing, and production
Implement row level security in multiple ways to secure your data
Save money by choosing the right licensing plan
Select a suitable connection type—Live Connection, DirectQuery, or Scheduled Refresh—for your use case
Set up a Power BI gateway to bridge between on-premises data sources and the Power BI cloud service
Who This Book Is For
Data analysts, developers, architects, and managers who want to leverage Power BI for their reporting solution Show less

Take advantage of the real power behind the BI components of SQL Server 2014, Excel 2013, and SharePoint 2013 with this hands-on book. This book will give you a competitive advantage by helping you to quickly learn how to design and build BI system with Microsoft BI tools.

This book starts with designing a data warehouse with dimensional modeling, and then looks at creating data models based on SSAS multidimensional and Tabular technologies. It will illustrate how to use SSIS for ETL… Show more

Take advantage of the real power behind the BI components of SQL Server 2014, Excel 2013, and SharePoint 2013 with this hands-on book. This book will give you a competitive advantage by helping you to quickly learn how to design and build BI system with Microsoft BI tools.

This book starts with designing a data warehouse with dimensional modeling, and then looks at creating data models based on SSAS multidimensional and Tabular technologies. It will illustrate how to use SSIS for ETL, and MDS and DQS for data governance and data quality. The book is packed with real-world examples that will give you a good understanding of the BI and DW components of SQL Server 2014, Excel 2013, and SharePoint 2013. Show less

SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) is a leading tool in the data warehouse industry - used for performing extraction, transformation, and load operations. This book is aligned with the most common methodology associated with SSIS known as Extract Transform and Load (ETL); ETL is responsible for the extraction of data from several sources, their cleansing, customization, and loading into a central repository normally called Data Warehouse or Data Mart.

Microsoft SQL Server 2012… Show more

SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) is a leading tool in the data warehouse industry - used for performing extraction, transformation, and load operations. This book is aligned with the most common methodology associated with SSIS known as Extract Transform and Load (ETL); ETL is responsible for the extraction of data from several sources, their cleansing, customization, and loading into a central repository normally called Data Warehouse or Data Mart.

Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Integration Services: An Expert Cookbook covers all the aspects of SSIS 2012 with lots of real-world scenarios to help readers understand usages of SSIS in every environment.

Written by two SQL Server MVPs who have in-depth knowledge of SSIS having worked with it for many years.

This book starts by creating simple data transfer packages with wizards and illustrates how to create more complex data transfer packages, troubleshoot packages, make robust SSIS packages, and how to boost the performance of data consolidation with SSIS. It then covers data flow transformations and advanced transformations for data cleansing, fuzzy and term extraction in detail. The book then dives deep into making a dynamic package with the help of expressions and variables, and performance tuning and consideration Show less

This book is all about SQL Server, but not an ordinal book about SQL Server from begin to end or on special aspect of SQL Server. This book covers 5 major topics of SQL Server ( Architecture and Design, Administration, Database Development, Performance Tuning and Optimization, and Business Intelligence ). Over 50 SQL Server MVPs contributed in writing this book.

I also wrote a chapter in the BI section of this book on SSIS with this title:
Exploring Different Types of Enumerators in… Show more

This book is all about SQL Server, but not an ordinal book about SQL Server from begin to end or on special aspect of SQL Server. This book covers 5 major topics of SQL Server ( Architecture and Design, Administration, Database Development, Performance Tuning and Optimization, and Business Intelligence ). Over 50 SQL Server MVPs contributed in writing this book.

I also wrote a chapter in the BI section of this book on SSIS with this title:
Exploring Different Types of Enumerators in the SSIS Foreach Loop Container Show less