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D3nnisd's avatar
D3nnisd
Frequent Visitor
7 years ago
Solved

DAX Product() function

Hi,   I'm a IT student currently self learning DAX as part of my upcomming internship.  I am using this guide to learn and Contoso Sales sample for this part.  So far its fairly straight forward, u...
  • marcorusso's avatar
    marcorusso
    7 years ago

    The Channel column is defined as Whole Number, it should be a Decimal - do that and it returns 24.

    That said - it's funny how it behave with an integer! I suggest submitting the issue to Microsoft.

     

    Marco Russo - SQLBI

Greg_Deckler's avatar
Greg_Deckler
Community Champion
7 years ago

Wow, I've been experimenting with this and I can't make heads or tails of what the PRODUCT function is doing. I get some bizarre results such as infinity, etc. that make absolutely no sense what-so-ever. marcorusso do you have any idea what the PRODUCT function is doing here because it certainly does not seem like it is returning the PRODUCT of a column. I cannot make heads or tails of what it is actually doing.

  • marcorusso's avatar
    marcorusso
    Most Valuable Professional
    7 years ago

    The Channel column is defined as Whole Number, it should be a Decimal - do that and it returns 24.

    That said - it's funny how it behave with an integer! I suggest submitting the issue to Microsoft.

     

    Marco Russo - SQLBI

    • Greg_Deckler's avatar
      Greg_Deckler
      Community Champion
      7 years ago

      Thanks marcorusso, that does solve the issue by making it a decimal number. But, as you said, weird!! I have be believe that is a bug.

    • D3nnisd's avatar
      D3nnisd
      Frequent Visitor
      7 years ago

      Thanks marcorusso ,  Greg_Deckler and Anonymous for replying!

       

      Changing it to a decimal did the trick.

      This raises 2 questions:

       

      - Where is that 0.79 comming from?

      - What is the absolute diffrence between a whole number and a decimal. Can the decimal be seen as a float and a whole number as a integer?  But this still doesnt explain where the 0.79 come from.

       

      I will report the issue to Microsoft.

      • marcorusso's avatar
        marcorusso
        Most Valuable Professional
        7 years ago

        Yes, decimal is a float and whole number is an integer.

        I don't know why there is this bug - I just imagined that PRODUCT is a function designed to work with decimal numbers because you usually use it to compute compound interests. However, it should work with integers too - Microsoft should answer for that, I would say it's a bug.

         

        Marco Russo - SQLBI

  • Anonymous's avatar
    Anonymous
    Not applicable
    7 years ago

    I can get productx to give the expected result

     

    For example on a table consisting of integers 1-9

     

    Measure = 

    PRODUCTX ( VALUES ( Table1[Column1] ), Table1[Column1] )

     

    returns 362,880 as expected.

     

    However, 

    Measure = 

    PRODUCTX ( Table1, Table1[Column1] )

     

    returns 0

     

    Which is identical to just PRODUCT() doesnt return the expected result.

     

    So a workaround for this is to use PRODUCTX over VALUES however as for why PRODUCT itself isnt behaving as expected I have no idea. My instinct is that this is a bug but I cant be sure.