Tag
10 posts
February 20, 2026
Mike and Tommy dive deep into what it means to live in a Direct Lake world, exploring the practical realities of building semantic models on top of Fabric lakehouses. They cover the trade-offs, gotchas, and best practices for teams making the shift from Import mode to Direct Lake.
July 25, 2025
Mike and Tommy tackle a mailbag question about the optimal Power BI architecture in the Fabric era versus the pre-Fabric world of dataflows and shared datasets. They explore how the lakehouse, notebooks, and AI agents are reshaping what 'better' really means for data teams.
July 18, 2025
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.
July 2, 2025
Mike and Tommy tackle a mailbag question from a small business struggling to justify Power BI and Fabric over their existing SSRS setup. They break down licensing strategies, the value of the semantic model, and why even small organizations can find the right price point for Fabric.
June 6, 2025
Mike and Tommy debate whether your next investment of time should go toward making reports better or making your semantic model AI-ready. They unpack Microsoft's new 'Prep Data for AI' features — AI instructions, AI data schema, and verified answers — and ask the hard question: is the juice worth the squeeze?
May 16, 2025
Mike and Tommy unpack TMDL — the Tabular Model Definition Language — tracing its origins from the monolithic BIM file to today's human-readable, file-per-object format. They explore practical use cases in VS Code, from find-and-replace renaming to AI-powered measure descriptions and unused-object cleanup with GitHub Copilot.
April 26, 2024
In this episode of Explicit Measures, we discuss the importance of semantic link.
January 26, 2024
Episode 288 is a practical checklist for gathering semantic model requirements: who the model is for, what definitions must be nailed down, and the constraints (grain, security, refresh) that drive design decisions.
November 10, 2023
Ep. 266 defines managed self-service in Power BI: shared semantic models with clear ownership + certification so business teams can build fast without breaking trust in the numbers.
July 12, 2023
In Ep. 231, Mike, Tommy, and Seth unpack what a “data model” actually is and why it matters—from conceptual diagrams to logical fields and finally the physical star schema you build in Power BI. You’ll learn how clearer modeling conversations reduce DAX complexity, improve trust, and set teams up for scalable, reusable reporting.