What happened in the DAX world in 2024

After another year, it is time to recap what happened in the DAX and SQLBI worlds and provide a few spoilers about 2025!

New DAX functions in 2024

In 2024, DAX added several functions to support visual calculations – a Power BI feature still in preview at the end of the year 2024. These 12 functions cannot be used in measures, calculated columns, nor calculated tables – they can only be used in visual calculations: COLLAPSE, COLLAPSEALL, EXPAND, EXPANDALL, FIRST, ISATLEVEL, LAST, MOVINGAVERAGE, NEXT, PREVIOUS, RANGE, and RUNNINGSUM.

Microsoft also introduced 14 new INFO functions, four of which (named with the prefix INFO.VIEW) are simpler to use for common requirements: INFO.VIEW.COLUMNS, INFO.VIEW.MEASURES, INFO.VIEW.RELATIONSHIPS, and INFO.VIEW.TABLES.

The other ten new functions are INFO.CALCDEPENDENCY, INFO.CATALOGS, INFO.CHANGEDPROPERTIES, INFO.EXCLUDEDARTIFACTS, INFO.FUNCTIONS, INFO.LINGUISTICMETADATA, INFO.PROPERTIES, INFO.STORAGETABLECOLUMNS, INFO.STORAGETABLECOLUMNSEGMENTS, and INFO.STORAGETABLES.

What SQLBI delivered in 2024

To work from home or not to work from home… While the world is trying to figure it out, we can confirm that people are returning to in-person events: conferences, community events, and training. The prediction we made a year ago about people’s new preferences (a combination of different types of experience) is not materializing. For example, the Fabric Conference was in-person in the US and in Europe (no remote attendees), and sessions were not recorded. We think the latter is not a good idea, as it makes the conference less attractive compared to those that do record the many sessions that take place, but several communities decided on a similar approach.

That said, we limit our in-person delivery time to 25-30% of our time, because we must produce new content! Here is what the SQLBI team was able to push out in 2024:

We completed the latest edition of the Optimizing DAX video course: We recorded the sections about composite models and released the complete video course after we had made the first part available in 2023. If you use Direct Lake, the course is relevant to you too: just peruse the VertiPaq sections because Direct Lake loads the Parquet file in memory and then uses the VertiPaq engine using xmSQL storage engine queries!
We published the Optimizing DAX book, also known as the Brick. A PDF copy of the book is provided to all people registering for the video course, but you can also buy the physical book on its own. The printed copy is expensive, we know, but then it is 800 pages + it can be used for upper body workouts and for holding heavy doors open.
We introduced a new in-person format, SQLBI Days: We delivered those on several continents. We are currently looking at how to improve them in the future based on the feedback we collected.
We published new content inside SQLBI+, our subscription service for advanced content for developers who create semantic models for Power BI, Analysis Services, and Fabric. In 2024 we released two courses inside SQLBI+: Understanding Visual Calculations in DAX (currently a draft whitepaper as long as the feature is just in preview) and Window Functions in DAX (whitepaper + video course). We also published new sessions in 2024, and the subscribers have access to the full library of SQLBI+ content.
Kurt Buhler joined us to write content for SQLBI. As you can see from his articles and videos, his content is currently focused on data visualization, and there is more to come in 2025!
In 2024, our SQLBI YouTube channel surpassed 100,000 subscribers (it is above 110,000 now). Yes, we recorded the unboxing of the YouTube plate in a video you cannot miss: SQLBI has more than 100,000 subscribers on YouTube. We also continued to publish a video for each corresponding article every other week.
We published more than 40 new articles and blog posts at sqlbi.com.
Our partner company, Tabular Tools, released DAX Optimizer for general availability. DAX Optimizer is a commercial tool for finding bottlenecks in the DAX code of semantic models in Power BI and Fabric. The tool is also integrated with Tabular Editor 3, and a license for one model is included in Tabular Editor Enterprise licenses.

What’s coming in 2025

Well, to tell you the truth, we cannot be sure that the following is going to be released in 2025… But Microsoft announced they have plans to implement user-defined functions (UDF) in DAX. In other words, you will be able to write calculations in a function and reuse that function (for example) in different measures without having to copy/paste the code.
We should release the third edition of The Definitive Guide to DAX. We started working on it in June 2024, but the book will be printed only once the new features (like UDF) are in public preview. For this reason, we do not have a publishing date yet. Technically, it cannot be before June 2025, but it could be later. We know that booksellers (like Amazon) may provide estimated publish and delivery dates – but you should simply ignore them. If we do not know the date our book will be completed, they definitely cannot know either!
Classroom courses in 2025: In order to focus on preparing new content, we have limited the number of classroom courses scheduled until April 2025. Expect new dates from May 2025 onwards, that we will publish by the end of February. You should hurry if you want a seat for a Mastering DAX class in February!
We are already working on new content for the SQLBI+ subscription, like the Security patterns in Tabular models. We will also publish at least one other new course and more sessions, but we must wait for the publishing dates of the new DAX features. More updates to come over the year.
There will be new data visualization articles and videos from Kurt Buhler, and something more. No spoilers here, but something is going to happen in the first half of 2025 – stay tuned!
Regular content: expect new articles and videos every other week!
New stuff: we are also working on several new things (free stuff), which we could classify in the “tools” category, even though this is not completely accurate. Expect updates of existing tools, but also something completely new!