What's up with DAX? – Ep. 442

Mike and Tommy refocus on DAX after weeks of Fabric talk. They cover the Power BI July 2025 feature summary, discuss what companies are actually doing about Fabric adoption, and dive deep into the current state and future of DAX.

News

• Power BI July 2025 Feature Summary — This month brings expanded data sharing with M365, PBIRS consolidating on-premises reporting from SQL Server 2025, Copilot improvements including verified answers and limited search to prepped content, and AI Data Schema updates in preview.

Beat from the Street: What Are Companies Doing About Fabric?

Mike and Tommy share observations from real-world consulting engagements about how companies are approaching Fabric adoption — the hesitations, the excitement, and the practical realities of transitioning from Pro and Premium Per User environments.

Main Discussion: What’s Up with DAX?

After weeks of heavy Fabric and architecture discussions, Mike and Tommy bring it back to the core of Power BI: DAX. They explore the current state of the language, how it fits in the Fabric era, and what the future holds for DAX developers.

Key themes from the discussion include the evolving role of DAX alongside new Fabric capabilities, how AI and agents interact with DAX-powered semantic models, and why mastering DAX remains essential even as the platform expands beyond traditional reporting.

Episode Transcript

Full verbatim transcript — click any timestamp to jump to that moment:

0:00 Heat. Heat. N. Welcome back to the Explicit Measures PO

0:32 Podcast with Tommy and Mike. Oh, flooded there for a second. Oh, that was a that was a bumpy landing. Got a little bubble in my throat all of a sudden there. And for some reason, I couldn’t get it out right. All right. Anyways, welcome back to the Explicit Measures podcast. We are jumping in today. A lot of news and articles today. So, , before we get into that, we just want to pay a little bit of note to our main topic today. Today, we’re going to talk about what’s up with DAX. I I don’t know if for those of you who’ve been following the podcast and those of you maybe listened to us earlier on, we’ve been doing this now, I think, for four

1:03 Years back into 2021. , but way back in the day, , when we started doing this, we talked a lot about DAX, PowerBI, report buildings, all those things. And we haven’t really talked about that very much. Recently we’ve been focusing a lot of our conversations around like fabric and governance and skills of your team members right which is all good these are all good things like to bring it back here a little bit and just say let’s talk about what our experience with DAX has been recently have we been changing how we interact with DAX in lie of fabric nowadays so anyways this is

1:37 Going to be our topic for today what’s up with DAX all right with that being said Tommy give us some news well Mike what’s up with you. How you doing, my friend? We got a lot of things going on. We got some news. Well, one one bit of news is every year Microsoft sends out a bunch of announcements around who’s becoming an MVP. So, for those of you who don’t know, Tommy and and I are both Microsoft MVPs. It stands for most valuable professional, not most valuable player, because we don’t play anything.

2:09 Obviously, we’re sitting behind computer screens most of our time. we just wish we could play things and this is also an unpaid position. So like this is just for the love of the game, the love of playing with PowerBI and working with Fabric and just being very vocal and outward facing around the Microsoft products and so Microsoft recognizes that and provides some level of leadership. These are individuals that are in the community that are producing a lot of great content and really promoting and helping companies and individuals win with their products.

2:42 That’s what an MVP does. And so Tommy and I have both been renewed. And funnily enough, you don’t get an MVP every year. You don’t get it and keep it. You every year you have to reapply. and it’s like a race to the top. It’s like a it’s like a very competitive space to become and stay stay as an MVP. They always evaluate what are you doing, how much content you’re create creating, are you reaching the impact of the scale of your impact is really what they’re looking for. How many people are interacting and listening to your

3:14 Your ideas and content? I I believe in the United States in our platform because there’s MVPs for all the different products, Excel, Windows, Azure. In our space there’s only I believe 160 in the USA. in the world. There’s only 300 or so data platform MVPs. So yeah, Mike, this is the most stressful time for me because for me what being MVP means, it’s it’s being recognized for the work that we do and I think the content that we produce, but it’s honestly it’s just one of the it’s

3:47 One of or maybe by far the thing that I’m most cherish or really feel honored about in what we do because I we love what we do and I think it it starts there for any MVP. Like I love what I do. I love talking about this in the morning. I would Mike if if Sirius FM said, “Hey, can you guys do a radio show about PowerBI?” I’m in. I’m in. I’ll wake up at 5 in the morning and welcome to Mike and Tom in the morning thing. Just talk PowerBI and fabric. So, it it’s awesome. Thank you, Microsoft. I

4:20 Can breathe a little easier. But hey, we got to keep our work going. We got to keep the content coming because now we’re getting evaluated for the next year. Yep. Already it has already begun. and the competition is already raised and some Tommy if you had to give some advice to someone who would maybe want to become an MVP. Maybe pay a little a little note here. I like this. Yeah. Right. So I’ve had a couple times people have asked us what what does it mean? How does it how do you get to become an MVP? I’d like to become one. Tommy, what would your recommendation be for someone who’s looking to become that MVP?

4:51 It starts with what you’re passionate about in the area. If you love the visual side, if you love the technical side or the governance side, understand what you really are have your niche because everyone has somewhat of a niche. And then really at that point, it’s spreading the word. So like again, the big part of MVP is not what you do for clients or in your organization. It’s community-led efforts. So one of the big things we started with was leading user groups. for other people. If you’re like, what, I really love data visualization and I have some really cool things I want to

5:24 Share. Well, start a blog, talk to Mike because he loves , putting content out there, too. And it’s really spreading the word on community-led things. but start with what you’re passionate about in the area and start with what you have a niche. You may think that everyone’s already talked about it, but I think what Microsoft really loves are the different voices, the diversity of voices out there, too. It’s not just, hey, has someone talked about visualization before? You may different spin on it and your own intake, where you’re from, what you do, may have a different spin on it and just get started writing or however

5:57 You want to produce that content. Mike, what would you say? Well, I would probably I’m going to I’m going to say a lot of it’s a it’s a race to the top of the pyramid basically, right? So, , , when you become an MVP in whatever area or discipline that you’re looking at, it could be SQL Server, it could be, , Visual Studio, it could be anything, honestly. , and what you’re looking at is you’re looking at everyone else in that area and evaluating like how much other content is being produced in that area versus what you’re producing, right? So, some people say, well, what’s what’s the formula? There

6:29 Is no formula. It’s purely amount of attention, right? you’re you’re literally looking at how much attention is being able to be or or impact or scale of a community whatever whatever the the numbers are you want to maximize that number right so for example if you have a blog and you blog 12 times a year if everyone else in your category is blogging 30 or 40 times a year you you probably wouldn’t make the cut right you’re not making enough content in that space to actually get to the top

6:59 Because they have a limit they have a cap on how many MVPs correct yeah there’s a there’s a finite budget that they can handle or use for MVPs and there’s there’s a limit to those numbers. So, what the you have to compete against everyone else in that space and so a couple words of advice that I would say is look at what new categories are being produced for MVPs. go on to the MVP site mvp.microsoft.com look at that category and see what other people are doing their their public works of what they’re producing like how much content what their impact is what

7:31 The size of their audience is usually is actually on the website like people are writing books people are making podcasts people are doing podcast every week or we’re doing twice a week so our our volume output is very high so anyways that’s just something to to consider when you’re thinking about that. So, find something you’re passionate about and do it because you’re passionate about the thing. Don’t do it because you want to become an MVP 100%. Because I think that’s how you burn out. Like, you just got to enjoy talking about the topic in general and and just

8:04 Enjoy talking about the topic. Just just be you. Just be authentic and and enjoy the topic and just do make a lot of content around what you enjoy doing. Yeah, I would recommend I got into this by doing a blog. That’s how I started at my MVP. I then quickly transitioned, I think it was like around 2019 is when I transitioned a lot more to like doing video content. I just decided that was going to be my thing. And so now I do a lot of YouTube and all the social media platforms via video. That’s like the main thing that we I spend a lot of time on. Speaking was a big part for me, Mike,

8:36 Because I remember going to a conference in New York and a lot of the speakers, while the content was good, I I was bored by the delivery. I’m like, well, man, I know this stuff at this point. And I’m like, and if I I want to treat Yeah. my speaking and however I did presentations or demos the way if I was in the audience. And that was like that big part for me, not an MVP. So I I completely agree with you on that. That’s also a good point too. Yeah, I think speaking speaking whether it’s being at a user group, whether it being at a conference, running those things are also very very relevant

9:09 As well. And again, if you can get big audiences or speak at large conferences, then that’s also a great opportunity for again continually engaging with the community. All right. Anyways, that’s about it. We’ll move on from there. All right. Let’s jump into some news. Tommy, we have some news today. The Microsoft July feature summary has landed. Any aha moments or any special items here, Tommy, that you feel are relevant? Yeah. So, I think we have to actually apologize to the groupies. We’ve said we’ve been doing PowerBI for 10 years, but that’s not official. So,

9:42 According to the date here on July 24th, the first announcement here is there’s going to be a special live episode of PowerBI Microsoft are doing for behind the scenes stories, product evolution highlights, and what’s in the future. So, I think that’s what they’re putting as the birth date because they say they’re turning 10. So officially we haven’t done PowerBI since Jul for 10 years even though I know Designer came out in June or May or June of 2015. July 24 is what they’re that’s the day they they’ve gonna say that’s the

10:16 Birthday. It’s like when you get a dog you’re like well what day is it born? Ah we’ll just say May thing. Well m maybe Microsoft’s a bit busy. Maybe the people like there’s a little plan it goes. Maybe Tommy like maybe the 24th isn’t its actual birthday. It’s like around the time of the birthday because like that’s how we do with our kids. Like sometimes we don’t celebrate our kids’ birthday on the birthday day. We do it like the weekend of cuz everyone’s available thing. So like Oh yeah. , maybe it’s maybe it’s one of these deals, , like to get it organized and everyone in town at the same time. It’s going to be, ,

10:50 The 24th. I’m not sure exactly, but anyways. Well, we we’ll go with it. We’re roughly 10 years old as of now. Well, they came in with a doozy. So, if you go to powerbi.microsoft.com, there’s a great blog out there. And honestly, Mike, filled with stuff. I’m going to highlight some of the things I’m personally love that they’re doing here. And they start off with, , our favorite co-pilot and AI. And Mike, we keep talking about co-pilot and what co-pilot in PowerBI and AI in general is

11:23 Doing for us and the skill that we need to learn. One of the things that has been our drum beat is around this year. It’s like it’s good but it needs improvement. Like we we need to see this grow and evolve and I love seeing that they they’re not that they’re listening to us. That’s not the case. But the fact that they’re understanding that hey we’re not where we want to be either. We it’s just a growth feature. So two big things here. improvements to standalone co-pilot answers that new co-pilot in PowerBI that’s does not live in a report

11:56 It lives in the service it’s own entity and they’re really working on just some of the updates where it can first look at the report itself before turning to the model I thought that was interesting because how I’m thinking of the co-pilot works and then also to really giving more weight to prepped content and Mike I I I think this is such an important part where we can’t just do general content around co-pilot. A big part of this is how the modelers are really modeling the AI side of it

12:28 And there’s that prep for data which now we can say hey co-pilot only search or look at and evaluate anything that’s been prepped. If it has not been prepped don’t communicate that to the user. I think that’s a huge huge win. And also this idea it’s about consistency of responses. about consistency of replies. Like it’s going to help make it an easier, more consistent experience. I would rather co-pilot say, “Hey, we can’t answer that now. We’re working on it.” Rather than give an answer that people are not going to trust or

13:03 Be satisfied with. We have verified answers with co-pilot search. Love this idea as well. And again, saying here are the questions or answers that are are that actually work. And again, this all goes to prepping with data. There’s updates to the data schema. So what columns can we actually choose or indicators to say hey choose state province from this table from the customer table not from the reseller table or whatever the case may be. This is Mike I I cannot emphasize how important it is that we continue to see

13:36 Updates around the co-pilot space. I I I think it’s going to be clearly it’s a direction from Microsoft, right? there I I yeah I look at like the announcements there’s like general events news. There’s some general announcements and immediately right away copilot AI that’s where most of the main events are occurring. I want to throw down a feature here around that I think is actually really interesting. We get another general availability. If we had a a sound effect yes I got it. I got it.

14:09 You got it. All right, good. So, we’ve got another field. We got another general available feature. Field parameters is now generally available, which very happy about that one be coming to completion. Again, I’m always excited when features get through to G. It feels like we’ve actually made it. there’s a lot of features that are in preview. It should just be a lot of these features just need to get knocked off the plate. Just knock them out, get them done. Let’s just get them all corrected and out for G. So, I’m I’m very pleased around that one. Mike, I I love field parameters. I actually have been using them, I would

14:41 Say, in the last six months more often than I really ever have since they were in preview and I’m finding more and more you use cases where it it really enhances a report. I don’t know about you how much you’re using them, but for me just that ability to do the fields and like I’ll have a a measure and a field in the same visual and that choose your own adventure, it’s really powerful and to me it’s like it’s more of advanced thing. I I wouldn’t put it in a new report for a new company right off the bat, but I I’m like my goal is to

15:14 Get there and I’m always thinking about that. I feel like this is one of these features or capabilities that are just useful to have when you’re doing not advanced reporting, but I’m just saying like we’re building really stylized reports and we’re going to be handing those out to our customers. It helps me as a developer. I want to be able to create one sum and then, , change it. The formatting like changing the formatting within a within a measure is actually useful as well. I also think that’s also very neat that you can change the formatting of the calculations that come out of the field parameters as well. So anyways, really like that feature. Glad that

15:45 That’s coming. Ger excited about that one. I have two more I want to maybe point on here. One I’m going to poke fun of which is something we’ve all been clamoring for. This is something that we’ve been really waiting for for many many months and years and improvements to donut and pie charts. Yes. Yes. Everyone’s favorite. The least contentious visual. The least contentious visual now gets an additional wait for it. You can now add a border the pie chart pieces. So now you can add

16:18 Border set. It does I will say this. It does make the pie charts look a lot more styled. It’s a little bit more modern that way. There’s like a two-tone coloring effect that goes along with the look like a glazed donut. It’s now a glazed donut. So anyways, for those of you who are really just hoping for additionally new features, I’m glad we’re spending a lot of money on development improvements and improving the donut chart. So nah, , okay, it pro someone probably wants it. Do I really need it? No. Do I care anything about donut chart? No, not really. But you’ve got to keep moving everything

16:50 Forward. Hopefully this means other borders will be applied to other visuals as well. just it’s so it’s probably more likely if there’s this feature of doing a border on visuals and the pie is now the one that gets it last out of all the other visuals that are out there. Anyways, just want to point that out. That’s a funny one. I have one more. Tommy, do you have any more before I go? Again, I I listen I think we both have the same one because of all the work that you’ve done with PowerBI tips on this. I think I’m I’m going to let you I think with your words right there. I think I think you you say it and I’ll finish it up here.

17:22 All right. All right. So, well, I’m the only thing I’m going to say is when Microsoft giveth generally available, it also giveth new previews with Mike. But then that’s all that’s all I’m going to say. But Mike, another preview. Another preview. I checked one off and I got to write one down. Mike, I I really Go ahead. Land the plane here. Well, I don’t know if this is the one that you were thinking of, though. So, I I actually think I’m on a different one. So, I need you I need you to say it now cuz I don’t I was thinking something differently. You might have confused me

17:54 With that. Yeah. What’s the new What’s the new preview? Dude, how could it not be organiz organizational themes? Oh, yes, that is one. I have a I have a different one. It’s still around theming, but this is one that’s important to me as well. Well, let’s let’s mention this one. So, holy crap. We finally have organizational themes now in preview officially announced in the blog here, which allow Copilot can create one. Intriguing. I’m It should be good at that. , of course. Why doesn’t compound do everything? Like, we’re not even Why do we even need

18:25 That one sounds like that shouldn’t be that difficult. We’re not dealing with the data model. It’s universal hex colors. Just give it that should be pretty easy. And really now it’s in the it’s in the admin center. You can add a theme and then simply apply that to a report. Come on. This is a huge win. I have in my GitHub internal repository in my SharePoint all these theme files that I if I update it’s like ah now I got to go back to all these reports and do this has been I had this from enterprise development we had different themes for different departments how annoying was

18:57 It to update finally I’m so excited about this yeah so this is this is one area that’s really useful I think this is going to be helpful it’s going to hopefully keep create consistency now what I’m not really clear about one I’ve been playing around with a little bit, but it’s it’s helping you manage validating and renaming schemes and some descriptions of these things. It’s just a a portal page. I’m not quite sure where this applies in other places in the service, right? So, , when we start talking about like how do we reapply it? What does this look like? Just because you have it,

19:29 , it’s going to allow C-pilot to use that theme when it creates reports. , but is it really actually used other places? like so just because you have an organizational theme what does that mean against your existing reports how does it work out so there’s a lot more to I think unpack here with this I think this is very happy to see this feature one thing that you may have be aware of we have a power designer workload inside fabric which allows you to build theme files and preview and test your files directly inside the the power designer application which is great we are actively working on where’s the API

20:04 To do anything with the organizational themes, right? So, , to me, I love the fact that it’s there, but in order for anyone to use organizational themes, you have to manually go upload and download the files right from your computer. There’s there’s no publicly available API to talk or discuss or or do things in the admin center with the theme stuff, which I’m disappointed about. I was hoping if they were going to land a organizational themes that they would at least put an API around it. So we or our developers could actually help users make that easier for them. So if you are in a

20:37 Large company and you have the ear of Microsoft, please ask for an API for organizational themes. We would love to be able to use that. we have some do we have done some digging into Michael Kowalsski’s code. Oh yeah. Yeah. He does have some you can be able you can get and delete theme files using Michael Kosski’s code. So that’s interesting. , so hm, , we’re looking at so so we know what we know what’s going on there, but there’s no available APIs that are published and documented from the published of website side. It’s it’s a private endpoint at that point. So FYI, just be

21:10 Aware of that. , that’s something that he’s using. , not in a sanctioned way, I guess. It’s not really really relevant, but it’s there. , but anyways, , we are looking for that as well. So stay tuned. There’s gonna be more coming there. And actually, my final announcement is very similar to organizational themes, Tommy. , my final call out here was a huge announcement, and I don’t know if you saw it on LinkedIn as well. Ruy Romano put out a really good announcement as well. The PowerBI enhanced report format. The PBIR format is it’s a there’s a significant step that the PBIR

21:45 Format represents I’m going to read it because I think it’s this important. represents a significant step forward in empowering developers and teams to embrace full control around CI/CD. With this update in July, they have addressed the final limitations of the PBIR including support for de deploying PBI reports using fabric deployment pipelines. So PBR is now officially in deployment pipelines. It works. Compatibility with save a copy as feature in the service now also works. invalidability with

22:17 Report usage metrics in the surface and full integration with all PowerBI rest APIs. So this is these are major milestones that needed to get accomplished in order to complete general availability of the PBI format. So I’ve had a lot of companies ask me about hey Mike what’s what’s up with PBI? Is this going to be in preview for the next 10 years or something? I don’t think so. I don’t think that’s going to be the case. And if I read Ruy’s comment on LinkedIn, let me see if I can go grab it here real quick and see what else they’ve got here.

22:50 Make sure I’ve got it here. Rui Romano, let me go check his his recent post. While you’re pulling that out, I’m going to ask a question because I’m leaning more and more. If I’m hiring a midlevel senior analyst and just to to out of the gate start running with PowerBI, are you expecting that person to be experienced? We’ll use the word experience with PBR because I am like I or be very disappointed if not at this point in time. To me, PBR is now an

23:23 Expected tool for more advanced level person in the fabric space. Well, I I don’t the tech this is like the technology under the hood. I don’t think it require that how to use every little nuance detail of them, but I do think it’s important that you understand what it’s there and what it’s there to do, right? So I don’t I don’t think we need to go into like the fine grain details like the techn the tech the technical part of it is still there. I think I need to have you understand why it exists. I think I do need to have you understand

23:54 Like it’s useful in CI/CD. I think I need it to be there enough to like let you say, “Oh, I’m actually going to do a diff between PBI in a get, , pull request and you’ll be able to at least somewhat read and understand what’s going on.” I think that’s the the deepest I needed people to go. I’m not going to expect you to build full PBR files directly from the service and like like go all in on the word experience, not necessarily that you’re writing it from scratch, but man, I I I’m going to ask you about it. like I will ask you questions about it and you’re going to need to tell me why it

24:26 Exists and how you would use it. Like that’s that’s the main focus I would give for like a new person around PBir, right? I I would just make sure they know about it. the I’m going back to Ruy’s note here on his his post here. this is he in in Ruy’s post, he actually has a sentence here that I want to really hang on because I think this is more important. We’ve resolved the last limitations of the PBIR format. So, we’re basically there. We’re at the finish line. So, this is probably going to run here for a

24:57 Bit. Microsoft has aggressively been working against that space in order to get it to work. So, anyways, I just wanted to call that out which cannot be understated. How important that No, it’s so that is so awesome. All right, let’s move from there. We’ve been talking a lot about news and things. There was a lot of news articles from the the Microsoft blog. Go check it out. It’s great. There’s a lot of good things. Very happy to see Microsoft developing brand new things. Let’s move on. Let’s go over to our main topic, Tommy. All right, let’s talk about what’s up with DAX. Let’s kick it off.

25:30 I’ll let you give me some introduction here. Where where you think we’re going to take this? Well, a lot of people and they you guys comment to us, man. You guys write to us and it’s awesome. And a lot of people have mentioned about the I talk a lot about fabric. We talk a lot about AI and I think this is a really good time to have this conversation Mike because our mental effort and I you used that phrase before we went on the podcast and I really like that our where’s our mental effort going I’ve noticed in my own behavior in my own projects it’s been a

26:04 Lot more around notebooks it’s been a lot more around semantic modeling still definitely less power query and I’m not near I’m still working on DAX but not nearly to the same degree if you were to look at five years ago and I think there’s a good conversation here or an important conversation on are we still giving the right do love and effort to the DAX language the importance of it or the question arises has it gone down from a skill point of

26:36 View if you were to say all the skills you need to know in fabric where does it align where is it in the priority of your experience and your own skill on knowing, learning, and applying at an organization. So, that’s the two areas that I want to have this conversation on. Mike, what’s your first take on this? Yeah, , I think we’ve I’m going to go this is more of like a a squirrel issue and I’m going to explain my my squirrel issue.

27:08 Sounds like one of setups. Yeah, it’s it’s a mic setup. This is definitely a setup. So I think of this as a squirrel issue. The idea that we had PowerBI, we had like our world there, data flows, PowerBI, data marts if you were ex willing to explore that now deprecated item. But we had pro and premium per user. All of a sudden we get this fabric thing and fabric comes with so many bells and whistles. it’s it’s taken what we could do in PowerBI previously and tripled it, quadrupled it. like the

27:41 Amount of things that you can create. I remember us Tommy early when we were doing like let’s learn fabric series. We were just building like in like two or three weeks of doing like a let’s learn fabric. We had so many items in the workspace. We’re like this is a cluttered mess like already and we just even started just a couple things. So there were so many more things for us to create and the workspaces are going to continue getting piles and piles and piles of things in them. So I think this is a pure case of world right. It is the fabric is the new thing. The fabric is something we’re all trying to

28:13 Understand. It is technology that’s been built other places. It’s Spark. It’s KQL. It’s SQL. It’s databases. It’s lakeouses. There’s all these really fun other technologies. And by bringing those fabric elements into PowerBI land, , one of the things that I think is really worth exploring for organizations is direct lake. Direct lake is awesome. Like one of my main pain points with like loading data into semantic models was like I just don’t want to have to wait for it to load. Can I do something different? So I think

28:45 Fabric has fundamentally changed how we think about modeling. Now I’ll pause. DAX I don’t think has changed. I think I think we still emphasize the same things on stacks but in the last 10 years of PowerBI we spent a lot of our initial learning in PowerBI figuring out how to make the DAX do what we want to do. And also to some degree the tooling for DAX has also gotten better. Like what would h what would have happened Tommy if we had Dax Crew review like in year two? Would we have had as many conversations

29:18 Around DAX? Would we would have gotten more sleep? I would have probably gotten more sleep. I think even just having even just thinking about DAX as just generating tables of data was like an aha moment for me later on because you’re doing it in DAX Studio. you had to go to all these third party tools. Now it’s part of the product. I’m really excited that DAX is there, but it also gave me a lot of different ways to interact with those DAX patterns and DAX things that are inside DAX. And now that Copilot’s here, , you can have a little bit of a crutch to lean on. It doesn’t it’s not going to do it correctly every single time, but you can

29:50 Leverage now C-pilot to help you. Hey, this doesn’t look right. Hey, I’m trying to do a different thing. Can you it’s not working correctly. Can you help me debug it a bit? You’re getting a little bit more assistance there as well. And I think the the barrier to get into DAX is lower. It’s less daunting than it used to be. So I’ll also echo for me right now that I have these direct lakes and things on the back end and it’s easier to get the data in and I can now reshape the data much more differently than I could before. And I think that’s for me has been the not a not a moment but it’s

30:24 It’s been more of a a change in thinking. I and this was going to be like one of my beat from the streets that I was going to allude to earlier which was what are companies doing with fabric right a lot of companies are still only in PowerBI they’re still just focusing on only the PowerBI experience and they’re just trying to venture into what does fabric mean we don’t want to pay more money for fabric how does this work and so I think companies are still grappling with like we still have legacy or other things that are only in PowerBI what’s the advantage of fabric and right now just for whatever reason

30:56 I’ve just gotten into pattern of consulting with a lot of companies that are only doing PowerBI and they’re just now dipping their toes in the water for fabric. And that’s right. I think that’s the right approach. So, I I think I’m shifting how I build the semantic models in order to get DAX to be simpler because I can like for example, we’ve had some DAX statements that had an in statement, , filter this thing if it’s in this this this and this. Well, now I’m thinking about other patterns on how to do this faster,

31:28 Right? Instead of using an in statement to filter DAX things, some filtering mechanism, I’m actually rethinking going, well, maybe we should just take those three columns and combine them and make an on or off filter. So, it’s easy enough for me to add a new column. Mhm. That is the filter context that I need to provide to that measure or something else in the tool. And then I just provide additional detail and allow it to filter a different way. So I think I’m physically thinking about the data structure differently now and trying to

32:01 Redesign the data structure in lie of DAX. And maybe that’s an evolution of like thinking to make that DAX faster to make it easier to work with and then my business rules are locked in fabric which I can still touch and change but it’s just upstream a little bit more. So that’s how I’m I’m looking at it. So, it’s still there, but I’m changing how I use it a little bit. Not only do I agree with you, I I have to double down. , one of my note takingaking strategies is I’ll circle things that are of high importance, want to get back to. And sometimes, Mike, when you when you have the monologue, I have too many things I circle because

32:35 You’re on point and it is a awesome. So, let me try to touch on some of the things that you said that for those listening to I think are highly highly important as we navigate the future here around power behind fabric. Yes, I agree with the shiny toy idea. And it’s true. It’s like, oh, it’s this new thing. Oh, there’s new items and I have 35 to choose from. It’s cool. And I think there’s definitely been that squirrel idea. And listen, for someone with ADHD or Oh, ADD, , no, ADD doesn’t exist anymore. ADHD is the only thing I found

33:09 That out. Speaking of I know, right? I I don’t even know anymore. I can’t keep up with it. No. Yeah, I I have to, unfortunately. But anyways, this idea of Yeah, you’re going to want to see and honestly, not just see it, but learn it. And yeah, so that’s going to take you mental effort and time and resources from your normal things. But here’s the thing that I I think that you highlighted that’s really part of this idea of where we’re going in just our world of data and especially the Microsoft data platform. Well, it’s the idea of what our projects are. If

33:43 You looked back three years ago, man, it’s Fabric’s only been out generally available for a year and really only was announced two years ago. We only had a limited things to choose from what we could create and 98% of them were reports and semantic models. That’s really what we were doing. That’s what our goal was with the data. Our final thing we were doing with data was a report and semantic model. So yeah, the big importance was around DAX, Power Query, the tables and reports. Also, you

34:16 Were limited too on how much you could transform because I couldn’t store the data anywhere. I could do a data flow, but you still had a lot of limitations on terms of how that actually works. So, DAX was of high per importance, if not number one in the power rankings, and I’m going to use that phrase as we go throughout today too on where does DAX sit on power rankings of where we focus. But in the world that we live in now, and it’s just the reality, and I don’t think this is just an opinion at this point, the reality is lakeous have

34:50 Changed more or less has changed everything on how we develop and what we’re developing. And those two things I want to focus on, especially when we’re talking about DAX. We are no longer just developing semantic models. This is the first thing is what are we developing? where because like a lakehouse does have the end goal of being a semantic model but that’s only one of the use cases and that may be the majority of them but that’s it’s no longer my end goal every time I get data to build a semantic

35:22 Model with nice stats reports it’s to store data that can be used in other places that I can push to an application or just having the data as a source of truth that could be used in other things so now I have more of a focus on what am I doing with my data in in the terms of a lakehouse. So I’m playing in that game in that playground with those skills and those that technical in a sense features. The other side of it is what you mentioned that I think this is so important is what can I do in a lakehouse with a semantic model. Not

35:56 Only now can I use direct lake, but I can use tables from multiple lakehouses and really transform it in a way that I couldn’t before to get exactly what I need. And I’m finding Mike the same situation you are where I don’t have the same problems I’d had before or is barriers with a semantic model that I needed to do and achieve with DAX where I’m like well I I could already filter this out or do this and it’s so quick and I don’t have to worry about the refresh and the load because I’m dealing with the lakehouse and direct lake that

36:29 I’m finding a lot more things achievable with doing the transformations farther upstream and especially getting the numbers that way because I’m develop to be honest DAX and semantic models are completely correlated and I’m finding I’m building semantic models differently which by default means I’m going to be developing my DAX differently now yeah our our YouTube chat is also resonating with this point as well so it’s there’s people there saying like a better model yields better DAX right and so

37:01 The number of times you’ve gone into a model or you’ve tried to do this complex weird filtering mechan mechanism of things. it it doesn’t really help so much when you have really bad data structure and you’re trying to do lots of filterings or a filtering with complicated. So you’re you’re the DAX is constantly recalculating summarized tables of things. Well, I control all the back end now. I control all the data engineering. I can control if we add aggregation tables in there or not. I can I don’t have to worry about

37:34 It. It just works. So I think for some degree that’s also really interesting there as well inside having more control. Now I do want to pause here in premium per user like so let’s imagine you’re purely pro you’re still premium per user you have the ability to have really large models you have the ability to let the there’s auto aggregations you can turn on for your semantic model. There’s a lot of other premium level features you just get by default. you don’t have to worry about it. Like it’s it’s you can get up to a model that has 100 gigabytes in size. So you can

38:07 Be a bit more generous with your DAX and letting the model selftune and optimize itself on its own. then you can you can let it be a bit more it’ll be a bit faster that way. So I I think there’s there’s also something to say here of around when you’re in the premium per user space and you have more capabilities at your disposal. There’s some more features that they’re turning on for you at that premium per user level. You’re still using DAX. it’s still you’re still able to have more tables, larger models, more information in them. You’re not as

38:40 Worried about that. So again, I just haven’t been focusing much of my learning or my attention around the DAX experiences. I think I’ve been focusing me personally where does most of my time get spent now, right? Most of my time is spent so to speak. Yeah. I I know what DAX is good at. DAX is great at filtering and aggregating. So, I’m going to try and build everything else I can to make it just be filtered and aggregations of things. And I’m going to I want to There’s an analogy I’ve used here, Tommy. I want to bounce this off you. Yeah.

39:11 I try and think about pre-agregating a lot of information. So when we talked to clients, we’re like, okay, what is the semantic model? So before in PowerBI world, you only had data flows and semantic models. Everything was stored in the semantic model. Basically that was your warehouse. We never had this c central collection of like bring everything to the common place, right? I can’t bring that’s a data flow. Like that’s the best we could do which was a data flow. It’s that a data flow is not a data warehouse. So when I’m looking at this space and I’m looking at how I’m building my DAX and things in here, I’m

39:44 Really trying to focus on how can I recalculate that data and like the aggregation. So let’s look at a summarize, right? So let’s imagine inside my formula, I need some summarize. I’m going to take some data. I’m going to group it by something and then produce a calculation on top of that, right? I’m aggregating the data in the DAX measure which takes a lot of memory. It get makes it go slower and every time you click a button it’s like reummarizing things. What I’m thinking now is I want to pre-calculate that summarization somewhere else and do it

40:18 Once and just always have it ready to go when we need it. And that’s where I’m using more of the back end of fabric to help me shape that data and say look we have this very detailed granular table. what can I do to produce aggregations by dropping out various columns, produce higher level grains of that table that are much faster to run but still meet the purpose of the report. So that’s another area that I’m also looking at too is how do I pre-agregate data, cache it as a table that’s stored in memory for the model and now every time

40:51 A user clicks on something I’m not trying to reagregate that table of time it’s already been done. You can save a lot of compute that way. a perfect example is I have two tables that I know I would have had to do in DAX with two different formulas before but because of how fast it is all I did was simply create a notebook and I trans modeled one of the tables in a different way that made it incredibly easier to write the DAX the second time now and I wouldn’t have done this if it was a semantic model because that’s just a lot more bloat and storage in the model but

41:23 I don’t have to worry about that. So I I I agree with you where we are the the technology we are now have available to us with fabric is changing the way we build a semantic model which of course is going to influence the DAX that we know. Mike I didn’t know if you had another point there but I did you mentioned another thing that I think is of high relevance here. I did not. So go ahead. Okay. And this is going to be a more of also a twofold question. It’s and I I’ll give a a pretty good analogy here. I my wife and I were just

41:56 Talking this morning before the podcast. We were talking about parenting and we’re talking about other parents and with all the technology that kids get, they’re losing other skills, right? And it’s like we’re giving them a phone and I’m like well for me I’m one of those you’re not coming inside till you two talk it out. I’ll tell my kids that and like critical thinking if but if they have a phone when they’re eight years old. The point I’m trying to say here is with co-pilot and AI it’s the same thing where listen I’m doing a lot with using AI and like chatbt to start my DAX

42:30 Formulas rather than starting from scratch. So I’m using it as a crutch. I’m not going to lie. I’m not I’m not too proud to say that that’s been a huge part for me. Now I wonder that for us Mike especially we’ve been doing DAX for 10 years we had back in our age we didn’t have no AI we had to read a book and learn it so and we had to figure out so I wonder if you and I are giving less relevance to DAX because we already have 10 years of experience

43:02 And we can use co-pilot and we can understand the basics of AI it’s like oh I know the rest I can do the rest thing but for a lot of people who are again not consultants or not in our 10 years of experience or whatever the case may be is that still the case so I wonder if we’re in this little bubble but so the let me phrase it this way to the two questions is AI making DAX less relevant and are we looking at this in a in the wrong angle because of our own personal

43:35 Experience well I I would hope after 10 years of working on things, right? Seriously, like I would hope after 10 years of working on all these DAX things. Yeah. We would have learned something. We know something better than we did. Like we teach classes on this. Like so I think the reason one of the reasons why we’re not talking as much on the podcast around DAX is because we’ve spent a lot of time with it. We’ve spent a good amount of time figuring it out, working with it, , pushing on it, pulling on it, learning it. I think that’s something that we’ve we’ve we’ve

44:07 Added to our repertoire. Right. Yeah. One of the things as again this is probably just me talking to myself at this point, right? As a leader in this space or someone who’s taught these things, sometimes you forget how hard it was to learn the thing initially because now it becomes just part of a known bit of information that you have. And so I think for that reason like look we’re going to try and stick with star models. We’re going to try and stick with simple aggregations and filtering on that. we’re going to shape the data better for the DAX formula. So our DAX formulas stay in a simpler state with a

44:40 Lot less complexity. There there’s still always this lens of and and I’ I’ve used this analogy when I talk about this in classes is you have a visual and you have the data model. There is a little bit of a game you play with the DAX formulas like there’s some conditional formatting. There’s like some special things you may want to do the DAX to have it interact with the visual. Now there’s visual that’s just not right. It’s not quite right. Yeah. Yeah. So like you’re always playing like you want the visual to look and interact a certain way. You have this vision of what the visual or the

45:13 Page should be doing. The challenge is when you start using DAX sometimes the model isn’t always shaped the best for that particular visual. nor do you want the the data structure to be exactly what that visual needs because then it will require other data model structure changes that might not be what you want right or you might be adding things to the data model that are only specific to that one visual eh doesn’t really make sense I don’t need to add three extra columns just to make one visual work unless it’s important enough right something along those lines so you’re always playing this game where you’re negotiating

45:46 Between what does the visual do and what does the performance of the DAX do and so I feel like we’ve traded off a little bit more on that now and now we’re able to offload that more to upstream and this goes back to Matthew Roach’s maxim right transform the data as far upstream as possible lakehouse pipelines notebooks and as far downstream as necessary DAX filtering on the report page right so do as much as you can upstream and then only when you need to do the last little bit on

46:17 Downstream and I think that’s what we’ve done like over these last 10 years is we’ve learned learned a lot in the PowerBI fabric our PowerBI DAX space which has informed how we build things in now fabric and now we’re scaling up on the fabric tooling knowing what we know about DAX to make the DAX easier for us to work with. At the same time though at the same time and I agree with this however I’m going to maybe play a little devil’s advocate here. One of the things I used to always mention that I still mention when I’m do when I do DAX introduction training

46:50 And intermediate advance is that DAX is the heartbeat of PowerBI. If power query is the brains and this is again we’re just talking pure PowerBI here that the core and the heart of PowerBI is DAX part of me feels like that hasn’t changed even with all the things we’re talking about because again I think you made a really good point you and I when we hear the words evaluation context and filter context probably don’t our heart probably doesn’t skip a beat

47:22 Or we probably don’t lose the same amount of breath that we did the first time we were learning it. So, we’re like, “Yeah, we we get that.” But if you don’t get that, if you don’t understand that, AI is not going to help you. It’s going to only get you so far at the end of the day because we know there’s all the gotchas, all the the potential pitfalls of, hey, the number looks good here, but you add it to this field or in this particular context, it’s not going to turn out the result that you want, not the desired output. Those those still rules still apply. Nothing in DAX has changed. nor has

47:56 Nothing in evaluation context or filter context has changed. They haven’t updated that feature or the the law the language there. So that’s just as permanent as ever. So I think what I’m trying to say is I still agree that in a PowerBI semantic model, DAX is the heartbeat of PowerBI. The only thing I may change is if you were to look at my I’m I’m considering looking at power rankings at all the skills and what you need to know in the Microsoft data platform. I would

48:29 Probably say before fabric without a doubt that DAX was number one. What I need to be a master of what you need to know. Number two would be semantic models. Number three would be power query. Some people can argue that but more or less those are your top three. Those those are the guys reaching the podium so to speak. But okay, I would probably I would I would still make the argument that DAX is the number one skill you needed to learn where we live now and everything we just talked about because at least you and I. Yeah,

48:59 I’d still agree with that. I think DAX is so common in actually. No, I would still I would agree with that. I think DAX is still number one as far as a you’re going to have to build it regardless. You you still don’t want to build a report with a bunch a bunch of implicit measures in it. You just don’t. Oh yeah. Right. So I don’t I don’t you’re going to be doing whether it’s just now your deck’s complexity may be much lower and one thing I would be interested to know is again I’m I’m thinking about this from like I’m reacting to your your comment here. Yeah. Is if you go to DAX.do this is Marco

49:32 Russo’s version of a DAX system that he has on his world. And I have to imagine Marco is doing some really interesting things. Like Marco is very strategic with what he does. He’s he doesn’t do anything half-heartedly and he doesn’t do anything without thinking about it fully. So if Marco is providing you a DAX formatter tool for free and he’s providing you a DAX.do website where you can write and learn about DAX for free. I guarantee you he’s using all the information that people are entering

50:04 In as DAX and grooming that and trying to make like a score. Like think of this. Let’s imagine every person who enters information into DAX formatter, right? Because it has to send it to DAX formatter and come back as a service. What if he has a score on top of every time that API is written? How complex is this DAX? How hard is it? What formulas are they using? Is that advanced features or not advanced features? Right? When you think about what Marco could be doing, I would be curious to look. This is peeling back

50:36 The curtain a bit. If we’re using DAX formatter and it is now simplifying and formatting all your DAX, it knows every single bit of statement in your DAX. Could Marco over time be seeing the complexity of DAX decreasing now with companies that are starting to use fabric? The formatting that’s required, the DAX that he’s getting, is there? And I would maybe argue that now with fabric and the ability to better data data shape your things and one of the reasons why I didn’t like to have semantic

51:07 Models do all my data shaping was it just took longer for it to process. Yeah. It would take I’d make more tables. The refresh would take longer and we don’t want the refresh to take a long time. But now that we’ve decoupled the refreshing cycle away from the model and using direct lake it just reads the data that’s directly there. I could aggregate until my heart’s content and then it doesn’t that that there’s no penalty to getting the data into the model and the refresh or the loading of that memory into cache or the model there’s really no penalty there. So I’ve shifted where my work occurs but I would argue because

51:41 I can now shift where that work occurs and there’s actually less penalty to provide more aggregated information my DAX can now be simpler. So I would maybe argue over time maybe Marco is starting to see the DAX complexity if a whole rolledup score is decreasing because of more capabilities inside. All right. So let’s go on this because I like where you’re going with this and this may be sound like a hot take but by your logic then by by that logic the first five years of us doing complex DAX was a waste. So here’s here’s where I’m going with

52:15 No, you learned what not to do. Yeah. No, but but at the same time though, and this I I I I want I want to hammer or really go on this because I like where you’re going with this. Those first five years, Mike, the first six years that you and I were pure semantic models and DAX, we had a lot of complex DAXs and by virtue of some of it had to be done. I I can I still remember some formulas or and at least the metric that we needed to output and what the tables we had available. But those experience and this may sound

52:48 Like I walked uphill backwards in the snow. Apologize but those experiences with with paper on your with paper shoes and all that thing. Yeah, exactly. but those experiences and what I learned doing those complex DAX things I I still carry with me today. I learned K techniques. I had a message the great Greg Baldini on things and I learned techniques that I previously would have no idea even if the model was bad. I learned these techniques that I

53:20 Still carry with me today. I know kung fu as Kiana Reeves would say thing as you learn and by virtue of what you said if we no longer have those situations. Well then are people they’re learning basic DAX. Yeah of course DAX is still important but then there’s a lot less people out there that have that advanced DAX concepts would then that’s where I’m going with that. Yeah I I would agree with you Tommy and and to be honest like this is the chat I can’t take credit for this one. Michael in the chat is hilarious. Nobody is

53:52 Listening to the implicit measures podcast. There’s there’s there’s a competing, , do everything with implicit measures. That’s, , you don’t drag columns. Yeah. What? So, yeah, I would agree with that one. And again, Tommy, I think I really I do want to echo like what what we learned in those hard complex DAX things, right? What what was that born out of? that was born out of a lack of knowledge of shaping the data upstream, shaping something a little bit easier. And now now that you recognize the problem is there, you don’t get to a

54:24 Place of making it simpler and better without spending some time learning some of the hard pieces in front of it. So I I think it was part of the journey and now people are more if you just listen to people that talk about this, read books about it. That’s is a common thread across many books and so it’s been a it’s been a journey for us and while the Microsoft product tools have been getting better we also as developers have been getting better and evolving with the product run alongside everything else. So I do think it’s like an eb and flow, right? We’re we’re ebbing and flowing a little bit. Who knows what will happen

54:56 In 5 years from now? What will it look like then? Will co-pilot be even better? And even still co-pilot on these initial DAX statements, it was rough at best. Like it wasn’t like remember when we had like, , ask a quick measures using co-pilot type things. It wasn’t great at really giving us answers and like I don’t really feel like this is right. I don’t think it should be running this DAX. Again, as the product team develops more on DAX, provides more information to co-pilot to learn on DAX what good patterns are, Microsoft is going to continue to evolve that product as well.

55:28 And I think it’s going to again continue to reduce the barrier for people and individuals to start learning and and using DAX inside their systems. So let’s answer the question. Mike, I’m going to provide the scenario a scenario for us as we get near the end here and we’ll see. I think we’ll see how we answer it and I think that’s going to really say where do we see the relevance. Mike, you are the PowerBI Prometheus. You have a clay that you can shape in your own image to become the expert in the fab in the space that

56:00 We’re in now. PowerBI fabric thing. You need to create in so many words the perfect business intell intelligence developer. They can do all things. So, they’re going to work in fabric. They’re gonna work in PowerBI. They’re going to build reports, but they’re going to do all the other things. Where are you focusing their time? What do you focus them on first? And what do you expect them in a priority point of view that they need to know? What skills, languages, the technology, or processes are you shaping your mold of clay?

56:35 Are we talking about someone like maybe fresh out of school, fresh out of college? Right. Yeah. Exact question. Yeah, they we’re starting from the ground. We’re starting at, , level one. I’m going to always lean I’m going to lean back on the star schema. , , Donald’s on the chat here as well. Donald will also echo like, , data warehousing 101 stuff, right? It’s it’s fact tables and dimensions. I think that’s a core concept. It doesn’t matter what you do, where you do it. That needs to be known across the board. You have to start there. Now, how much you transform that

57:08 Upstream inside the warehouse and the the, , Python notebooks, all that stuff, that’s debatable, but if you’re just starting someone out, I want you to be effective immediately, right out of the gate, right? And you have to you have to be comfortable working in PowerBI desktop. You’ve got to be comfortable getting data in. So, there’s a little bit of Power Query in there, right? Enough to get going. And I would focus on learn dimension modeling, right? understand like we the amount of conversations I have all the time is like junk dimensions yeah keep it Kimble right that’s

57:42 Keep that’s that’s a pretty good mantra I that I think just by learning that that will get you extremely far and then you can always add like accentuate your knowledge with little nuggets of like okay I’m going to write some I’m going to I’m going to put everything in the lake house I’m going to add some pipelines I think those are easy enough to learn conceptually that it makes sense But even when I’m building that, I want to be able to talk to you and say, “Hey, Tommy, let’s build a gold layer. Our gold layer should represent a star schema. You should know by those words

58:14 What that means, right?” And I think if I can’t communicate that to somebody else in the team, like the understanding of what that means, then we’re at a loss. Like now we’re now we’re struggling. And that will that will then inform how you build your DAX and everything else that goes along with it. So a lot of times I think what I see is people are bringing in too many really wide really fat tables like lots of rows but really long wide tables there’s no dimension modeling and that will work on smaller models but that’s when the DAX gets really

58:47 Complex because the DAX isn’t aggregated in the right way and you’re doing summarizations and you want to change the filter context of something and and that’s it’s the nested filter contextes that make your head melt And so if you can get rid of those or not and simplify it so you’re not having to do that as much, all the better. You’re speaking of what Chuck Sterling’s favorite phrase was. They called those bats big tables. But I cannot say the word in between. Yes. Big tables. Big tables. You could fill in your the rest of those listening. But so I I if I

59:22 Think about the same scenario for myself, I have this mold of clay that I can see in the image that I see fit. I yeah I think number one regardless if wherever your fabric PowerBI is it start with semantic models and a real keen understanding of the concepts there and the technical process there because that’s going to influence what we do with the lakehouse is going to influence what we do with DAX but Mike I think from there I’m very torn if I am starting them next on notebooks and the lakehouse or if I’m

59:55 Starting them on DAX if I had to pick one and this is because we we like I said I think by virtue of we we’re playing a different game right now. that being said and I know we’re getting we’ll past time at this point those two if anything are tied right now where in terms of the importance because you cannot be successful in PowerBI without DAX and not just your basic DAX but with a keen understanding and being comfortable with filter context. You can’t you can’t it it to me it’s you you

1:00:29 Are waiting for you’re the Led Zeppelin. It’s waiting to explode at that point. You cannot get away with being a PowerBI professional or even a fabric professional without being an expert in your filter context and how DAX works. Yeah, you can use AI and chat GPT. You can use I feel like you just talked yourself feel like you just talked yourself into I think I am. I think I am. I I think you just I think you just internally came around full circle and said you need to learn DAX. You you have to you cannot get away with it. You may not have to know all the

1:01:01 Formulas. The difference is I may not have to know all the functions because I do have chat GPT but I can’t just copy and paste either because you’re going you will have inaccuracies and you will have things unless you understand how filter context works. That concept to me is maybe it’s not even DAX, maybe it’s just filter context. At the end of the day, if I don’t understand that, I I’m going to fall. I’m going to fall off the horse. I think one of the the moments here that was very impactful for me was the ability to take DAX statements from the PowerBI report building side of things

1:01:34 And start running them inside DAX quick view. DAX query view, sorry, Dax view. DAX review is a really neat tool where you can run specific sections of DAX and see what it’s actually doing, what table is being produced. That’s I think very useful to me. And and the one of the things that I think is very difficult for people to understand is when you’re when you’re like if you’re in Excel, you’re writing formulas that you can physically see. When you’re inside PowerBI desktop, you don’t necessarily get to see the output of the formulas anymore. It’s abstracted and the filter context of the table or what’s

1:02:09 Happening on the report page potentially impacts your DAX statement. So there’s a lot of hidden unvisual filters and things that are occurring that are potentially impacting your DAX that you can’t see. So that’s why I think going back to like DAX query view and decompressing your DAX into line by line variables and statements and things helps you understand what’s actually occurring inside the DAX statement and you can better debug it using DAX. There’s no there’s tag editor has a DAX debugger but I can’t I can’t hover like I can’t have a variable or a DAX statement and

1:02:42 Hover something and say what’s the output of that table look like? What does that look like for me? So I think this is where I really like being able to see the formulas and that’s one of the reasons I think why I love everyone loves Excel is because every time you write a formula the output’s right there. You can see exactly what it’s producing. You can test it. There’s a lot of iterative tests visually seeing data being outputed from there. and the DAX language in desktop the way it’s been built it’s just you don’t see as much of it and that’s when it gets harder you actually have to just know how it works and what the filter context is doing and and that’s that’s something we don’t

1:03:14 Always get all right Rob Collie who had Power Pivot Pro you mentioned that’s like my favorite article I’ve ever read of all time it was from Power Pivot Pro and about breaking down your DAX that changed everything for me so no I I I love it I love it Mike all right with that being said I think we are at time thank you very for listening. Great chat discussion today. Thank you all the input from the team here. I just love it. Everyone has got really good comments here and I think they’re really funny comments as well. So I really really appreciate those as well. Thank you all so much.

1:03:46 And there is no again back to the chat comments. There is no implicit measures podcast that does not exist cuz it’s cuz you got to write the explicit measures. Got to create the DAX. That being said, thank you all so much for listening today. We appreciate your ears. We know you can be doing a million other things. So, please, if you found this conversation interesting and intriguing, we’d love it for you to share with somebody else. That being said, Tommy, where else can you find the podcast? Oh, man. You can find us on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcast. Make sure to subscribe and leave a rating. It really does help us out a ton. Or share with a friend since we do this for free. Do you have a

1:04:21 Question, an idea, or a topic that you want us to talk about? Maybe we should continue this conversation. Well, head over to PowerBI Tips/mpodcast. Leave your name and a great question. And finally, join us live every Tuesday and Thursday, 7:30 a.m. Central, and join the conversation on all of PowerBI tips social media channels. Thank you all so much, and we’ll see you next time. Let’s

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