The growing adoption of Power BI Desktop is gathering new users of the DAX language. At the same time, there are a few new features, such as bidirectional filter propagation, that introduce new concepts to existing knowledge. For this reason, in the last  Read more

The August 2015 update of Power BI Desktop added two important features for existing Excel and Analysis Services users: Import Excel Power BI artifacts (Data Model, Queries, Power View) into a new Power BI Desktop file Live Analysis Services Connections  Read more

We presented a few session at SQLBits and the video of these sessions are available. This is the list of sessions available from SQLBits 8 and SQLBits 9 – just click the link on the title and jump to the…  Read more

If you use DAX, you should try DAX Formatter . Now it supports all the new functions introduced in Power BI Desktop and in Excel 2016. There are more than 70 new functions, even if half of them corresponds to Excel functions with the same name (see the  Read more

Aug 15, 2015

Costs of Relationships in DAX

The relationships in a data model queried by DAX are a fundamental part of the engine and simplify the query itself. This article examines the cost of relationships in a data model, providing hints to optimize them.  Read more

I and Alberto Ferrari recently completed the writing of The Definitive Guide to DAX , and we spent months to correctly describe the internals of evaluation context in this language. There are many details that make data model working with both DAX and  Read more

After months of public preview, Microsoft today is releasing the Power BI service to general availability. The preview was really a beta that evolved in these months, and I personally liked the approach that MS developers have now. I did not read the  Read more

Thanks to Darren Gosbell we have DAX Studio 2.2. In this new release: Tracing (query plans and server timings) available for Power Pivot Basic implementation of Intellisense Connect to Multidimensional SSAS servers Support for multiple Power BI Desginer  Read more

In the last few weeks I and Teo Lachev took the ownership of DAX Editor code. It is an add-in for Visual Studio that allows you to edit DAX measures in a text editor instead of using the Measure grid. It also provides other features (such as editing measures  Read more

After the initial release of DAX Studio 2.0, in December 2014, I started working on a few features to analyze performance of DAX queries. Darren Gosbell implemented many other features, and Daniele Perilli helped us with the graphics of the UI. We certainly  Read more