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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

I was looking at the list of M functions supported in custom connectors and not in Power BI Desktop (using the technique I blogged about here) in the latest version of the Power Query SDK when I came ...