I have seen many different types of custom calendars implemented in Power Pivot, Tabular, and DAX. I also wrote several articles (week based calendars and time patterns). However, there is a scenario that is hard to manage with the classical approaches, which I discussed in a new article.
Suppose you want to implement custom comparisons. For example, if you select a range of dates including the Thanksgiving day, how do you compare that period with the previous year? For example, Thanksgiving was in November 27 in 2008 and in November 22 in 2007. Two different weeks also from the calendar point of view. Similar problems when you want to compare Easter days. Not to mention any particular requirements when you want to define an arbitrary correspondence between days of one year with the previous year. You can see an example of this in the ISO YOY Date column in the following screenshot.
With DAX it’s relatively easy implementing this approach by using the Calendar table. You simply store for each day the corresponding day in the previous year, and write a DAX formula that will use this correspondence to apply the filter for the comparison, regardless of the selected range of days (it will work also when you select weeks, months, or quarters). You can fine more details and download an example in the Custom Year-Over-Year Calculation in DAX article on SQLBI web site.