by Chris Webb | Oct 18, 2026 | Chris Webb
The September release of Power BI saw the introduction of a powerful new feature: full text indexing, which makes searching and filtering on text columns much faster and enables the use of the new TextContains() and TextSimilarity() DAX functions. You need to enable...
by Chris Webb | Oct 11, 2026 | Chris Webb
As a follow-on from last week’s post about the new ApproximateDistinctCount function in DAX, I want to share something I found out from my recent testing for this function: ApproximateDistinctCount is sometimes slower than DistinctCount. This sounds counter-intuitive,...
by Chris Webb | Oct 4, 2026 | Chris Webb
As you’ve probably seen in the blog post for the September 2026 release of Power BI, Import mode and Direct Lake mode semantic models now support the ApproximateDistinctCount() DAX function. I tested its performance on a Direct Lake semantic model with a 1.4 billion...
by Chris Webb | Sep 27, 2026 | Chris Webb
There are some nice improvements to Power Query integration in the latest version of Power BI Report Builder that, while they are documented, didn’t get an official blog post but which I think deserve to be highlighted. First of all the “Get Data” button has been...
by Chris Webb | Sep 20, 2026 | Chris Webb
A few weeks ago I wrote about how Semantic Link Labs now has tools with interactive UIs and showed how you could use this to view lineage and so Vertipaq-Analyzer-stuff in a notebook. I didn’t show what I think is the coolest new feature though: the ability to find...
by Chris Webb | Sep 13, 2026 | Chris Webb
Here’s a situation I’ve found myself in many times. You’re called to help someone whose Power BI report is suddenly very slow. You ask whether any changes were made to the semantic model around the time performance got worse and the answer is no, absolutely not. You...
