Ginger Grant continues her series on Analysis Services Tabular best practices:
Optimize your DAX Code
While it is not easy to performance tune DAX you can do it, by evaluating the DAX Query Plan and VeritPaq Queries, and SQLBI’s VertiPaq Analyzer. Also, you can also look to use functions which perform better, for example COUNTROWS instead of DISTINCTCOUNT or ADDCOLUMNS instead of SUMMARIZE. Whenever possible use the CALCULATE function instead of the FILTER function, as CALCULATE filters for context inside the parenthesis and are more efficient. Also all of the iterative functions SUMX, COUNTX etc., should be used sparingly as the row-by-row transactions they create are less efficient and should be used only when SUM or COUNT will not work. When evaluating if a value missing, if it is possible, use ISEMPTY instead of ISBLANK as ISEMPTY looks only for the presence of a row, which is faster than the evaluation performed by ISBLANK.
Read on for several more items in this vein.