Power BI August Release And SSAS Performance Improvements

Chris Webb points out something new in the Power BI August 2018 release:

While I was playing around with the new release (August 2018) of Power BI Desktop I noticed there was an undocumented change: similar to the OData improvements I blogged about here, there is a new option in the AnalysisServices.Database() and AnalysisServices.Databases() M functions that turns on a newer version of the MDX generation layer used by the Power Query engine. Like the OData improvements it is an option called Implementation=”2.0”, used like this:

AnalysisServices.Databases(
	"localhost", 
	[
		TypedMeasureColumns=true, 
		Implementation="2.0"
	]
)

…and also, as with the OData improvements, you will need to manually edit any existing M queries to take advantage of this.

Read on for Chris’s test and analysis of the resulting MDX output.