DAX

Optimization has become one of my favorite topics. OK, I’ll admit it: it might be an obsession and a source of joy. My inability to optimize (queries, data models, and DAX) used to be a source of headaches and the occasional heart attack depending on what I was trying to accomplish. I make no claim that I’m an

This article shows how to compute a running total over a dimension, like for example the date. A very common calculation in DAX is the year-to-date calcula

I woke up Saturday morning to a lot of chatter and blog articles about an announcement that Microsoft made at SQL Bits. Microsoft is adding “Calculation Groups” to the DAX language. Th…

Introduction One of the first things that befuddles people that know other coding languages when learning DAX is the absence of constructs for traditional “for” and “while” loops. This is a well understood limitation and just generally accepted by people who have learned DAX. However, when answering...

With the release of CTP 2.3 of SQL Server 2019 today there was big news for Analysis Services Tabular developers: Calculation Groups. You can read all about them in detail in this blog post: In my …

Information, tips, news and announcements about Azure Analysis Services (Azure AS) and SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) directly from the product team.

Microsoft announced at SqlBits a very important feature for DAX: Calculation Groups. These are my first impression about the new feature and the impact it w

This article describes how to display the filter context applied to a calculation using a special DAX measure in Power BI Tooltips. Understanding the filte

Recently, I was helping someone on Power BI community forum on the issue of calendar over run while comparing values with last year’s data. I thought it would make a good article to share wit…

Yesterday I answered to a question related to parameters in DAX that could be useful to other readers who use DAX in Reporting Services (SSRS): how to manag

This article describes how to write DAX measures that compute aggregations or comparisons with past dates without showing or comparing future dates. DAX ti

DST Refresh Date Function Power BI Service. For Power BI service, the local time is UTC (Universal Time Coordinated). Quick tip on creating a custom function to get local time year-round, even with da…

This article describes the real meaning of and the required action for a few common error messages that can appear when users define DAX expressions in Powe

This is a companion article to my talk, “Working with advanced DAX Models”. It includes some links to documentation, the slide deck, and the PBIX file used in the demos. I am planning t…

The current version of DAX has a limitation for names you can provide to variables in a DAX expression: a variable name cannot be the name of a table in the

Today I ran across a pretty straightforward DAX challenge that is made so much simpler thanks to variables. So I decided to share it. Remember folks use variables for each...

Data lineage is a DAX feature so well-implemented that most developers use it without knowing about its existence. This article describes the data lineage a

We are approaching the end of 2018, so it is a good time to review what happened in the DAX world this year, what we’ve been up to at SQLBI and what is go

Today I woke up with an interesting question, about how to show a selection of months in a nice way, detecting contiguous selection. You can easily underst

Activating bidirectional cross-filter in a Tabular data model might create ambiguous paths in the chain of relationships, resulting in very dangerous models

Power BI is the (best) data visualization tool of Microsoft. But how to apply your color formatting to your visuals without changing it by hand for every visual separately, which is an option of co…