Category: DAX

Bernat Agullo Rosello compares two capabilities:

Ever since DAX UDFs came out as public preview in September 2025, many DAX developers started wondering how they will compare with calculation groups since both have the centralization of code as one of their main selling points. As pointed out in a recent article by SQLBI they are indeed very different beasts, even though they can be used to achieve very similar outputs.

In short, a calculation group is a model-level object whose items swap one DAX expression for another at evaluation time. Once an item is in the filter context, it applies to every measure being evaluated. A DAX UDF is a smaller object: a named, reusable expression with parameters, callable from any measure but invisible to report users.

Read on to see when calculation groups still make sense and when DAX UDFs are the better choice.

Marco Russo and Alberto Ferrari show off something new:

A calculated column is computed when the table is refreshed and stored in the model (in Import mode), just like any other column, so its value does not depend on the user who is connected. The introduction of user-aware calculated columns in Power BI changes this picture because we can define a calculated column that is evaluated at query time and depends on the user running the query. This behavior can be obtained by setting the Expression Context property of a calculated column to User Context.

Click through to see the benefit of this new functionality.

Marco Russo and Alberto Ferrari provide a deeper answer:

A very common request by Power BI newbies is, “How can I use a slicer to filter a measure rather than a regular model column?” The most common answer to this question is, “You cannot filter a measure through a slicer”. The answer is entirely correct because there is no such thing as “filtering a measure”. However, elaborating on the why gives us a good way to explain not only what is wrong with the question, but also how to further reason about the requirements needed to obtain a working solution.

This blog post is an example of how challenging it can be to answer a beginner’s question, where the immediate answer is “No, you can’t do that” but the underlying problem is solvable.

Teo Lachev has ideal columns:

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.

Nikola Ilic digs into a new feature:

A few weeks ago, I was sitting in a session at FabCon Atlanta. It was an amazing session about Direct Lake semantic models and various optimization tips and tricks, delivered by true masters, Christian Wade and Phil Seamark (both from Microsoft). Among many fantastic topics, the one that immediately caught my attention was the new feature that Christian Wade introduced: User-context-aware calculated columns.

Although we all know that DAX calculated columns are the “last island” in what are considered recommended data modeling practices (“Roche’s Maxim”, etc.), this one still stood out for me as something that might be super useful in certain scenarios.

Read on to see how it works and scenarios in which it could be useful.