Coming back from a long vacation, I’ve almost missed this interesting Power BI enhancement: Power BI unmaterialized calculated columns. Normally, I avoid the traditional DAX calculated columns for a variety of reasons, such as confusion about where business logic is applied, limited support across storage modes (for example, Direct Lake doesn’t support them), longer refresh times, etc. This not to say that calculated columns can’t be useful, such as in the case where you need to flatten a parent-child hierarchy. But unmaterialized calculated columns could open interesting scenarios that go beyond content translation to other languages mentioned by Microsoft in the April 2026 update.
Click through to learn what unmaterialized columns are and how they work.