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Finding the Real Error in a DAX Measure

Teo Lachev builds on a prior post:

This blog builds upon my previous “Resolving Tabular Conversion Errors” and applies to Analysis Services in all flavors (Power BI, MD, and Tabular). In the scenario I described in the previous blog, the server at least told us the name of the offending measure in the error description. But sometimes you might not be that lucky. For example, recently I got this error when running a DAX query requesting many measures: “Microsoft OLE DB Provider for Analysis Services.” Hresult: 0x80004005 Description: “MdxScript(Model) (2000, 133) Failed to resolve name ‘SYNTAXERROR’. It is not a valid table, variable, or function name.” All we know is that there is a syntax error in some measure but good luck finding it if you have hundreds of measures in the query and your model. However, the (2000,133) section references the line number and column number in the MDX script (Yeap, MDX even if you use Tabular), so if we can get the script, we might be able to correlate the error.

Read on to see how you can capture that script and get the error. The technique is definitely not intuitive.