Analyst in Action

DAX Studio has proved to be a great external tool for Power BI and we have prepared a beginner's guide on the most common use cases that one can encounter while using it. This week we will focus on going a level beyond and discover a bit more advanced use cases that will help you to use DAX Studio in a better way. Ultimate goal for today's article is to surpass the beginner level and reach advanced level of DAX Studio. We would recommend to first have a quick read on the beginner's guide before continuing here. In this article we will focus on running benchmark on your queries, formatting queries both short line and long line, defining dependent measures and lastly and one of my favourite importing performance data in DAX Studio. Before we start make sure you have the latest version of DAX Studio installed. Let's get started, with the simplest of the use cases - writing and formatting queries in DAX Studio. Generally, this is more towards enhancing the readability of ...

Another week another blog!! This week we will be focusing on the optimising the bad performing measures and how to tackle the measures generating Call back ID. Before starting, this blog is intended for Users who are a bit familiar with DAX Studio if not then you can do a quick read on our most read blog on our website ( link ). Performance of report is a great factor in improving in the user experience and to check how well your visuals and DAX formulas are performing you can utilise the benefits of Performance Analyser. In my experience Performance analyser along with the DAX Studio is a match made in heaven. You can copy the query from Performance analyser and evaluate in DAX Studio. To know more about how performance analyser works do visit this interesting article ( link ). Let's get our hands dirty and see how you can evaluate your DAX formulas. To do so I have created a basic DAX with help of Filter function  Now, we have included this measure in a table along with the year ...

Are you still struggling with slow reports and a complex data model and you have tried every approach to optimise it? One of the major reason behind your slow reports are high cardinality fields. What is this cardinality now? The simplest definition for it would be the unique values present in a particular column.  Do note we are talking about the unique values not distinct values there is a slight difference between these two. Want to learn more about cardinality here is a great article from Arno. If you have a background in data analysis then the term cardinality may not be alien for you. When we talk about optimising the data model then it is always advised to reduce the cardinality as more the unique values available in a particular column  more it will take the memory and impacts the performance. In this article, we will focus on a few easy steps to reduce the cardinality of the data model. The very fundamental and the simplest step will be to only include the fields tha...

There are zillions of external tools available with Power BI but DAX Studio is one of the most commonly used tools to work with DAX queries. It is a perfect tool to optimize the DAX and the data model. In this blog let's shed some light on the basic functionalities that can take your report to the next level. ARE YOU READY?  To start you will need the latest version of the DAX Studio. You can download it from their website . Don't worry you don't have to pay for the license. Fortunately, DAX Studio is a free tool As a BI Developer, I am using DAX Studio regularly. Based on my experience I use it for several purposes but in this blog, I will highlight the most common ones. Extracting a dump of all the measures used in your PBIX. Why do we need to do this? It can be used for documentation purposes also sometimes we try to reuse the DAX and such a dump comes in handy in this scenario. How to achieve it? Open the DAX Studio it is located under the external tools once you open t...

Writing a DAX can be tricky at times and making it efficient for the system is always a challenge for a BI Developer. The most prominent example is the use of filters in DAX. There are zillion ways to filter something in DAX and attain the same result but when you look behind the scenes you will get to know what effect it makes on performance. Looking at the above image it all looks the same. In this blog, we will cover the most common scenarios to use filters including the use of filter with all, filter with values, and keepfilters. I am using the sample superstore data for demonstration. The idea is to get sales for "Tables". The DAX is as follows. The most common and basic approach will be this. Looking at the matrix it gives the sales amount of tables as the total sales for "Furniture". If we use this in a table or matrix results can be perplexing for the user. Considering the total it does make sense. But we want every sub-category to get their respective sales...