Best practices for deciding when to use (and when not to use) KEEPFILTERS in CALCULATE filter arguments ..read more

This article describes the best practices for deciding when to use (and when not to use) KEEPFILTERS in CALCULATE filter arguments. In the article Using KEEPFILTERS in DAX, we described how to use KEEPFILTERS, which is a function that preserves the existing filter on columns affected by a new filter applied by CALCULATE or CALCULATETABLE. We suggest reading that article if you are not familiar with KEEPFILTERS. However, we wanted to clarify a rule of thumb you can apply to quickly decide when to use KEEPFILTERS or not in most cases. This will allow you to only invest more time when you are d ..read more

We are proud to announce the availability of our new book, Optimizing DAX. Optimizing DAX is considered a second edition because it aligns with the video course, even though we did not publish a book for the first edition. If you are a student of the video course, you already have access to the PDF version of the book. Thus, this announcement is for those who want a printed copy or are not interested in the video course. This is the state-of-the-art book on optimizing DAX expressions in Power BI, Fabric, and Analysis Services. If you use Direct Lake in Fabric, you can reference the VertiPaq s ..read more

How to compare time series that occur in different periods by standardizing the timelines to days since a specific event ..read more

This article describes how to compare time series that occur in different periods by standardizing the timelines to days since a specific event. In a previous article about format strings, we showed an example of how format strings can improve visualizations. The visualizations in that article compared the performance of a company’s marketing videos on a streaming platform to the average of all their videos released that year. In this article, we explain how to conduct this analysis yourself in DAX, where you compare series that occur in different periods. This analysis compares the initial ..read more

Digital media content creators have an ethical responsibility to journalistic integrity. All of them do; all of us… including myself. At the last few international conferences I attended (SqlBits and Microsoft Fabric Conference), I had several interesting discussions with various content creators about their experience creating content about software products and services. I also talked with many attendees who consume the content and who rely on this content for self-education, to stay up-to-date, and even to make important company decisions – decisions they sometimes regret because of incor ..read more

Almost a year ago, we announced the release of three sections (core concepts, formula engine, and VertiPaq); in November 2023, we released the DirectQuery over SQL section; now, in April 2024, we release the last section of Optimizing DAX about Composite Models. What’s new in the Composite Models section The fifth and last section of Optimizing DAX second edition covers composite and complex models: that is, any scenario where a model has multiple data sources of different types, including other semantic models. This new section adds another 5 hours of lectures in three modules: Understandi ..read more

See when EXPAND and COLLAPSE are required to obtain the correct result with visual calculations in Power BI ..read more

This article provides examples of visual calculations where the use of EXPAND and COLLAPSE is required to obtain the correct result. In previous articles, we introduced the concepts of visual context, the visual lattice, and the two visual context navigation operations: EXPAND and COLLAPSE. In this article, we build on that knowledge to first compute a simple percentage over the parent: a simple calculation to consolidate the understanding of EXPAND and COLLAPSE. Next, we move on to a much more complex scenario, computing the inflation-adjusted sales using visual calculations. Computing the p ..read more

What is the right choice between Direct Lake and Import mode in Power BI? At SQLBI, we do not publish content until we have had enough time to experiment with and collect data about new features. We usually don’t break the news unless we have enough time to test a feature in preview and consider the released service solid enough. This did not happen with Direct Lake, and we have not published any Direct Lake content yet, but it seemed not urgent for reasons we will see soon. However, the feedback collected from many attendees of SqlBits 2024 and the first Microsoft Fabric Conference raised th ..read more