After years in “stealth mode,” we’re excited to introduce DAX Optimizer. Dive deeper here: daxoptimizer.com/blog/introd… DAX Optimizer is a tool – delivered as a service – that helps identify potential bottlenecks and suggests impactful solutions and priorities. You still write the code, but it is like you have a mentor on the side teaching you best practices, focusing on the most impactful area of your measures. Spend your time where it matters, getting immediate improvements. For example, you may have 200 measures, many of which have similar coding practice issues: Where to start? DAX Optimizer guides you to the more important measures, which could be the ones that are more frequently used by other measures and not necessarily those that directly appear on any report. Now that we are out of stealth mode, we have much to say: how it works, how it preserves sensitive data, how it works for teams and individual developers, and share the plans to improve it over time. We will do that in the coming weeks. Where are we now? Our beta program is live, initial users are onboarded, and the waitlist is growing. We’re gradually rolling out invitation codes in the coming weeks. The service is functional, the UI for a single developer is polished, and the documentation is shaping up. While we work towards our public release, we’ll be actively seeking your feedback to refine DAX Optimizer. We won’t be rolling out a major marketing campaign yet, as we’re committed to perfecting the tool. Do not expect videos or articles from us until public release. That said, beta participants are welcome to share their experiences, as we do not require any NDA. Articles, videos, with the good and the bad – all are fair game. We believe in transparency! Join us in shaping the future of coding with DAX Optimizer. Your code, optimized. daxoptimizer.com/

The first one goes down on its own. The second one is why we made the “DAX with AI” course.  sqlbi.com/campaign/dax-with-… How many pills are you willing to take?

Are there still people writing meaningful articles/blog posts? I try to monitor what's being published in the semantic models/Power BI space (for the News section of the SQLBI newsletter). In the last few months, more and more articles in the "blog" section of a company (I mean, many companies) have been completely useless. I want to give free suggestions since they paid some SEO expert for bad advice: - Choose a topic that could be helpful. Present a technical problem with a solution. Don't vaguely repeat the marketing stunt of big companies. - The LLM you use can create diagrams. SVG works better than PNG/JPG. You can also use animations. - Did you ask yourself if you make your company look better after publishing it? Hey, I could be wrong! If you have an explanation for why slop content can help a company, I'd be glad to hear it.

On October 16, Microsoft will delete the legacy boards from Microsoft Whiteboard, which will be retired from personal accounts. (That's 22 days from today!) If your boards live in a personal account, your window is even shorter: starting tomorrow, September 25, those accounts go read-only. Whatever you planned to save, save it within the next week. How to export (see the picture below): 1. Click on Settings (top-right) 2. Click on Export 3. Click on Zip (HTML+JSON) Only the ZIP format has all the details you can use for future import. Moreover, you get an HTML format that renders well in a browser without requiring any additional app. We built SQLBI Whiteboard because we teach with a whiteboard every week and didn't want to lose the tool. It's free, open-source, and runs offline on Windows. Export your existing boards first, so you don't lose your data. Soon, you will be able to import your exported Microsoft Whiteboard files into SQLBI Whiteboard (We are still working on it!) You can get a taste of the new app if you want (import will be implemented soon): sqlbi.com/tools/sqlbi-whiteb…

The time has come: in 2026, 𝘂𝘀𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗔𝗜 𝘁𝗼 𝘄𝗿𝗶𝘁𝗲 𝗗𝗔𝗫 𝗵𝗮𝘀 𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗿𝘁𝗲𝗱 𝘁𝗼 𝗯𝗲 𝗲𝗳𝗳𝗲𝗰𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲. We also created three new video courses that should not become obsolete in two weeks! 𝗔𝗜 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗣𝗼𝘄𝗲𝗿 𝗕𝗜: 𝗜𝗻𝘁𝗿𝗼 (𝗳𝗿𝗲𝗲!) 𝗗𝗔𝗫 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝗔𝗜: 𝗘𝘀𝘀𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗶𝗮𝗹𝘀 𝗗𝗔𝗫 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝗔𝗜: 𝗦𝗰𝗲𝗻𝗮𝗿𝗶𝗼𝘀 We have a page dedicated to AI for Power BI and DAX, where you can also find the link to these courses: sqlbi.com/ai/?aff=twitter I wrote a long post to recap what has changed between 2023 and 2026, and trying to answer many questions I expect to receive: sqlbi.com/blog/marco/2026/09… I am looking forward to receiving all types of comments! 🙂

A simple daily average can mask complexity that isn't immediately apparent. In this article and video, we explore several edge-case scenarios to meet different requirements, using AI to speed up development. sqlbi.com/articles/the-hidde… #dax #powerbi

I have a free online session about VertiPaq on Saturday, September 26, 10:00 UTC (11:00am GMT, 12:00pm CEST, 6:00am EST). If you think Direct Lake is the new kid in town, well, internally it's always VertiPaq after transcoding... so... no excuses! Agenda/registration at retrodata.live/

Good news, everyone. The meeting about protecting focus time was well attended. Do you need focus time to focus on your focus time? Wrong answers only!

10% error on Facebook Likes and everybody's happy; 0.1% on your financial data and you're paying a fine (or worse!) When you receive data, some of the assumptions you make about it are broken. You can accept it, you drop it, or you write a report about what's wrong: all three can be the right answer. I picked two extremes to make the point; most work sits in the middle, where you can live with lower quality, but you have to know you're accepting it. Watch the full webinar: youtu.be/qtnLNZFRZ84

DAX evolves, and the in-person course you can take this Fall isn't the same as what we taught four years ago. Not every new DAX function makes the cut; the course can't grow forever, so something new has to push something else out. This year, the new thing is AI for model authoring, and yes, we'll look at AI tools to write DAX: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, Copilot... All these tools require the same approach to get what you need and not just something that seems to work. Knowing DAX is still very helpful and productive! The last five dates in 2026 for the Mastering DAX Workshop: 🇵🇱 Warsaw, October 12-14 sqlbi.com/p/mastering-dax-wo… 🇨🇭 Lugano, October 27-29 sqlbi.com/p/mastering-dax-wo… 🇺🇸 Atlanta, November 9-11 sqlbi.com/p/mastering-dax-wo… 🇬🇧 London, November 24-26 sqlbi.com/p/mastering-dax-wo…  🇳🇱 Amsterdam, December 1-3 sqlbi.com/p/mastering-dax-wo…

If you teach/demo... Prepare a presentation for SQLBI Whiteboard: - Create a .wimport file with the text, code, and bitmap to include - Open it with SQLBI Whiteboard - Start the presentation, highlight and mark elements There is also an export to PDF/PPTX, but that's a topic for another day. whiteboard.sqlbi.com/ Microsoft Store: apps.microsoft.com/detail/9n… GitHub: github.com/sql-bi/SQLBI-Whit…

A DAX calculation can produce convincing values at the detail level and fail at the total. The problem is often that the business rule was evaluated at the wrong granularity. This article+video introduces four grains, or levels of granularity, that should be identified before writing your DAX formula. sqlbi.com/articles/writing-d… #dax #powerbi

Many-to-many relationships are valid in Power BI, so are bidirectional filters. However, they're not considered best practice, which is different. A best practice in Power BI is what you do by default when you have no reason to make an exception. It's a suggestion, not a principle. Isn’t it the same in other domains?

CTRL+V: paste DAX code F6: Format it Highlight the code and teach. It also works with SQL. Interested in other languages? SQLBI Whiteboard is free and open source. whiteboard.sqlbi.com · Microsoft Store: apps.microsoft.com/detail/9N… · GitHub: github.com/sql-bi/SQLBI-Whit…

A new episode of "The Whiteboard" series, where I talk about matrix totals in Power BI. Special guest: the SQLBI Whiteboard! youtu.be/jbGEXZ85Nr0 #powerbi #dax #whiteboard

Do you think Direct Lake is the future? It's all about VertiPaq after transcoding! Join my free session on VertiPaq: Sept 26, 10:00 UTC. No excuses! Register now: retrodata.live/ #VertiPaq

SUMX ( Customer, ... ) looks safe. In my demo, it loses over 20% of the revenue. Fair enough; we made a dramatic demo to get that! The blank row DAX adds for the orphan transactions isn't in a table reference, so the iterator never sees that money. VALUES ( Customer ) brings it back. With MAXX, do the opposite. Watch the full video here: youtu.be/anSUtRETJUo?si=qsJN…

Your report. Live. On a whiteboard. This is LiveView in SQLBI Whiteboard: capture any running window onto the canvas. Your Power BI report is there, updating live. You can freeze the frame and draw over it. Or draw while it's changing, if you want! No screenshots, no window switching, no "let me share my other screen." You can use any window, not just Power BI. whiteboard.sqlbi.com · Microsoft Store: apps.microsoft.com/detail/9N… · GitHub: github.com/sql-bi/SQLBI-Whit…

A yet-unpredicted side effect of agent coding could be a resurgence of client software over web apps. It's still early to say, but I'm starting to see more signs of that.