As a follow-on from last week’s post about the new ApproximateDistinctCount function in DAX, I want to share something I found out from my recent testing for this function: ApproximateDistinctCount is ...

As a follow-on from last week’s post about the new ApproximateDistinctCount function in DAX, I want to share something I found out from my recent testing for this function: ApproximateDistinctCount is ...

Market basket analysis is a fairly well understood problem for SSAS – it’s best handled using many-to-many relationships, as shown in the excellent The Many-to-Many Revolution white paper. However the ...

When DirectQuery mode for Power BI was announced I assumed it was just the next version of SSAS Tabular DirectQuery mode with the same extra features that we’ll get in SSAS 2016 (such as better SQL ...

There are some nice improvements to Power Query integration in the latest version of Power BI Report Builder that, while they are documented, didn’t get an official blog post but which I think deserve ...

One problem that can really drive you crazy when working with data from text files is the many different formats that dates and numbers can be stored in around the world. For example, take a look at ...

Continuing my (already very long) series on what information you should be adding to the AI Instructions of your semantic model and why, in this post I’ll show you the benefits of adding the DAX ...

As you’ve probably seen in the blog post for the September 2026 release of Power BI, Import mode and Direct Lake mode semantic models now support the ApproximateDistinctCount() DAX function. I tested ...

Here’s a situation I’ve found myself in many times. You’re called to help someone whose Power BI report is suddenly very slow. You ask whether any changes were made to the semantic model around the ...

Although it was announced in this blog post on the Microsoft 365 Insider blog recently, you might have missed the news that Excel Copilot can now generate Power Query queries. There are limitations ...

If you have a DirectQuery fact table in Power BI you can use user-defined aggregations to improve query performance; querying a smaller, summarised copy of your data in an Import mode aggregation ...

A few weeks ago I wrote about how Semantic Link Labs now has tools with interactive UIs and showed how you could use this to view lineage and so Vertipaq-Analyzer-stuff in a notebook. I didn’t show ...