No, this is not the end-of-the-year blog post about what happened in 2024: There is still more than one month to go!
However, we are receiving many requests asking what we are working on at SQLBI. I wanted to write a short blog post to address these questions, as well as guide those of you who are looking to be strategic in their upcoming Black Friday shopping.
Let’s start with DAX: yes, we are writing the third edition of The Definitive Guide to DAX, and working on a third edition of the Mastering DAX video course. However, they will only be available around mid-2025. If you see an earlier publishing date on other websites, do not trust it! For example, these days, Amazon has a publish date of Nov. 1, 2024 for The Definitive Guide to DAX – which is completely inaccurate!
The new book and video course will be rather different from what you may be studying today, not because DAX has changed much since 2019 (new features do not affect the existing content) but because we always look for new ways to describe abstract concepts. Every discussion in every classroom course we teach and every comment you leave in the discussion section of the Mastering DAX video course show us that there are a number of ways we can phrase what we teach… We will talk more about these changes when we are close to the release date.
However, the real reason we have to wait until mid-2025 is… <NDA>! I cannot say more, but believe me, you do not want a book at the beginning of 2025 that does not include <NDA>!
If you want to learn DAX now, the current Definitive Guide to DAX and Mastering DAX video course are indeed relevant, because their content is up-to-date.
There is a 10-15% of new features that will be covered in the next year update. In the meantime, you can read the articles and videos about window functions and visual calculations, which were released after we published the second edition of our book.
What about the video course? Well, if you have had your eye on Mastering DAX but wanted to wait for the next version to purchase your licenses, we recommend you go ahead with your purchase now, of the current version, at the Black Friday pricing. Indeed, all the licenses that are active for Mastering DAX on the day we release the third edition will automatically be upgraded to the third edition.
And what about SQLBI+? By the end of December 2024, we will be releasing two new sessions included in this subscription service:
- one is about visual calculations preview in Power BI;
- the other is about tools and techniques for DAX Optimization
We are also working on new video courses coming in 2025:
- a new video course about security patterns in Tabular models (including Power BI) that should be available by the end of January 2025 – in the meantime, SQLBI+ subscribers already have access to the corresponding Understanding Visual Calculations in DAX white paper, which we will update when needed.
- the complete video course about visual calculations will be completed after that feature becomes generally available or close to that state;
- we cannot disclose other titles at this time (really, we cannot break NDA!)
I hope this information will help you plan the purchases you need for the end of the year. I would love nothing more than to share more spoilers for 2025 from SQLBI, but I cannot: I have to keep things to say in my end-of-year summary, right? Stay tuned!