SQLBI Newsletter #310

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NEW ARTICLE

Measuring the impact of promotions on sales in Power BI

This article describes the data model and DAX measures to analyze the effectiveness of campaigns, by separating attributed sales (directly linked to a campaign) from influenced sales (all sales of products participating in campaigns, regardless of attribution).
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TOOLS

Introducing DAX Optimizer Basic

A new way of trying DAX Optimizer for free is now available: DAX Optimizer Basic lets you test the performance of your semantic models without installing anything and without paying upfront. This is to address several pieces of feedback we received.
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ANNOUNCEMENT

Introducing DAX Lib

DAX Lib is the shared home for User-Defined Functions (UDFs) in DAX. Free, open-source, community driven, no installation. Use existing libraries to create SVG visuals, custom format strings, and much else!
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COMICS

AI BI Blunders

This comic has been generated by AI using so many prompts...

#310 · Dec 2025

LEARNING

Course calendar

DATA MODELING - 3 DAYS

	Jul 21-23 - Amsterdam

Mastering DAX - 3 DAYS

	Feb 18-20 - Phoenix
	Mar 3-5 - Amsterdam
	Mar 30-Apr 1 - Houston
	Apr 8-10 - New York City
	May 5-7 - Copenhagen
	May 27-29 - Baltimore
	Jun 10-12 - Zürich
	Jun 15-17 - Berlin
	Jun 30-Jul 2 - Amsterdam

video courses

	Introducing DAX
	Mastering DAX
	Optimizing DAX
	Intro to Data Modeling
	Data Modeling for Power BI
	Mastering Tabular
	DAX Tools Video Course
	DAX Patterns
	Power BI Dashboard Design

BI-WEEKLY NEWS DIGEST

Latest news

	• Impact of Calendar-based time intelligence on Power BI DirectQuery performance The new way to manage time intelligence calculations in DAX provides shines for DirectQuery performance. Well, import is always better, but if you have to use DirectQuery, check how much you could improve certain measures. Nov 30, 2025 · Chris Webb
	• DAX Package Manager in Tabular Editor You saw a piece about DAX Lib above in this newsletter. If you have Tabular Editor 3, you will find out that DAX Lib is already fully integrated and will save you time when importing/updating DAX libraries in your model. Dec 2, 2025 · Ruben Van de Voorde
	• Deployment pipelines and Power BI semantic models with Direct Lake on OneLake tables If you use deployment pipelines and DirectLake on OneLake, you must manually change a few things to make the deployment pipeline work correctly. Dec 2, 2025 · Zoe Douglas
	• Drillthrough in Excel now supported for Direct Lake and DirectQuery models The Details Rows property you can edit in semantic models with Tabular Editor and TMDL view controls the drillthrough feature in Excel PivotTables. However, it was not working on Direct Lake and DirectQuery until a few days ago. Problem solved. Excel will live forever, and we are happy about that! Dec 9, 2025 · Microsoft
	• Top N + Others without any changes in the data model One (unexpected?) side effect of simplifying the creation of custom visuals with DAX by using user-defined functions, is the ability to manipulate a table in a measure and to return a custom SVG/HTML result displayed in a matrix. Exciting times ahead! Dec 2, 2025 · Andrzej Leszkiewicz
	• SSIS 2025 generally available This piece of news is dedicated to those few newsletter subscribers who started their BI journey with SQL Server on-premises and implemented the full stack. Folks, there is a new version of SSIS, and you can use it on Fabric too! Dec 10, 2025 · Microsoft

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