Analyzing events with a duration in DAX
This article analyzes how to efficiently work with events that lasts over time, such as the duration of an order considering the distance between order date and ship date.
Whenever we speak about orders, we think at sale orders. In a more generic way, an order is a request that you make and that requires some work to be completed, like an order to some machinery that builds stuff, an order to a software developer to build a website, or the request to accomplish any kind of work. All these types of orders have a start date, an end date and, many times, you are interested in understanding and aggregating what is happening between the two dates. The canonical way of modeling similar scenarios is to use two dates or time columns associated to the same entity or the same event. You cannot associate such an element to a single point in time, because the effects span over a period of time. This is one of the many examples which are covered in the new book about data modeling for Excel and Power BI.