Bill Anton reminds me that I don’t know a thing about DAX:
As you can see, using DAX variables is a much better solution than using the aliases…the performance improvement is about the same, however, variables we can wrapped up in the calculated measures inside the model allowing us to take advantage of the performance gain with all tools (not just those allowing us to hand-craft the DAX queries).
The query used in this post is too simple to highlight the performance benefit (small data dataset, simple calculation)…but it did make it easier to cruise the query plans and SE requests. In reality, a better use case for highlighting the performance benefits of these optimizations is with a query that hammers the Formula Engine (FE).
Interesting stuff, even for someone with no knowledge of DAX.