In the last few years, the Business Intelligence (BI) world has been moving towards self-service BI. As expected, several vendors created tools empowering regular users to gain insights from their data. Among the many, there is Power BI. Nowadays, users…  Read more

This article describes the differences between report-based tools and model-based tools. Because Power BI is a model-based tool and not a report-based tool, it is useful to have a quick reference guide explaining these differences.  Read more

This article describes how to use the detail rows expression of a measure to obtain the equivalent of creating table functions in DAX. This allows the reusing of a table expression in multiple CALCULATE filters.  Read more

Today we start the preview of Smart Filter Pro. This is the first commercial custom visual produced by OKViz and it will be in preview until the end of 2018. You can start using it today, no registration required, and…  Read more

By answering to a student question I realized we often used a wrong calculation of customers age in DAX, and the simple solution is to borrow the same technique used in Excel, using INT and YEARFRAC rather than DATEDIFF or…  Read more

This article describes how to optimize DAX expressions with mutually exclusive calculations that might cause slow query performance.  Read more

This article describes a very common optimization pattern that relies on variables to optimize conditional expressions in DAX.  Read more

I received a question about how to implement the equivalent of a DISTINCTCOUNTX function in DAX. Well, such a function doesn’t exist in DAX, but imagine you want to write something like: The corresponding measure working in DAX is: In…  Read more

When you create a Tabular model for Analysis Services, the Culture and Collation properties are set automatically and cannot be changed by the SSDT user interface in Visual Studio. The biggest issue is the workspace database, because these properties cannot…  Read more

If you have a fiscal year starting in March, you can have a problem using the time intelligence functions in DAX. For example, by using February 28, the fiscal year starts on February 29th in leap years. By using February…  Read more