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Day: June 30, 2026

Reviewing the Power BI Date Picker

Teo Lachev takes a look at a new preview:

The June release of Power BI Desktop includes a preview of a new Power BI slicer configuration – Date Picker. It’s meant to solve two issues with report design.

Read on to see what those two issues are and how this new date picker can resolve them. It’s still in preview, so you’d have to change the settings in Power BI Desktop. And I imagine it won’t be available in Power BI Report Server because those people (including me) can’t be trusted to have nice things.

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Using REMOVEFILTERS in DAX UDFs

Marco Russo and Alberto Ferrari make use of REMOVEFILTERS:

A DAX user-defined function, also known as a UDF, is expected to return a scalar or a table. However, because functions are fundamentally macro-expansion of DAX code, it is possible to return CALCULATE modifiers if the function is to be called only as a filter argument of CALCULATE.

To show a practical example of when the feature proves to be useful, we debug a measure that fails because some calendar filters are not being removed correctly. Fixing the measure elegantly requires creating a function that removes filters rather than returning a value.

Click through for that example.

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Controlling Memory Grants in SQL Server

Erik Darling has a new video:

So we’ve got this query here that I have pre-run because it takes a little bit to run. And I don’t want to stand here in the hot, light heat while I wait for all this. This query will ask for quite a big memory grant, both because it is written in a way with this derived join, which will force us to run this query and produce a result.

And two, because we are selecting all of the columns from the comments table, one of them being a column called text, which is in InvarCar 700. So just to sort of get ahead of things a little bit, this query asks for an 11 gig memory grant. If you want to fix a big memory grant, you have three basic things you can do for any given query.

Click through to learn what you can do.

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Master Database Compatibility Level

Jeff Iannucci explains an issue:

We were attempting to install a troubleshooting stored procedure in the master database of a SQL Server 2016 instance when we received the following error.

Msg 195, Level 15, State 10, Procedure sp_ShootTheTrouble, Line 227 [Batch Start Line 7]

‘TRY_CONVERT’ is not a recognized built-in function name.

This was unexpected, as TRY_CONVERT has been a command since SQL Server 2012. As a consequence, we were unable to install the stored procedure.

Tracking system database compatibility levels is a minor chore but an important one after an upgrade.

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