What does DATENAME function in Power BI ? Power BI interview questions and answers 150

What does DATENAME function in Power BI ? 

In Power BI, the DATENAME function doesn't exist. However, there are similar functions like DATEPART and FORMAT that might be what you're looking for.

Here's a breakdown of what these functions do:

1. DATEPART Function:

• This function extracts a specific component (part) from a date/time value.

• It takes two arguments:

• expression: The date/time value you want to extract the part from.

• datepart: The specific part you want to extract, such as "year", "month", "quarter", "day", "hour", etc.

• Example:

DATEPART(Year, '2023-10-26')

This will return the year (2023) from the date '2023-10-26'.

2. FORMAT Function:

• This function formats a date/time value according to a specified format string.

• It takes two arguments:

• expression: The date/time value you want to format.

• format_string: The format string that defines how the date/time will be displayed.

• Example:

FORMAT('2023-10-26', "ddd")

This will return the day of the week ("Thu") for the date '2023-10-26'.

3. Alternative for DATENAME:

• While there isn't a direct equivalent of DATENAME in Power BI, you can combine DATEPART and FORMAT functions to achieve a similar result. For instance, to get the full name of the month from a date, you can do:

FORMAT(DATEPART(Month, '2023-10-26'), "MMMM")

This will return "October" for the date '2023-10-26'.

I hope this helps clarify the functions available in Power BI for working with dates and times. If you have any further questions or specific scenarios in mind, feel free to ask! I'm always happy to assist you with your Power BI queries.