I am happy to announce that v3.1.0 of DAX Studio has just been released. There are a number of new features in this release including a brand new command line which will allow for the automation of common tasks. Be sure to read through the details of all the new and updated features here: v3.1.0 Release | DAX Studio

Today I am pleased to announce that the next update to DAX Studio is now available. It is a minor point release that includes one or two small updates and a number of fixes including what is hopefully a definitive fix to the “xmlReader in use” errors some of you have been seeing in 3.0.6

Check out the detailed release notes here v3.0.7 Release | DAX Studio

I am pleased to announce that v3.0.6 of DAX Studio has just been released. You can download this version from https://daxstudio.org and for more details on what’s new in blog post here v3.0.6 Release | DAX Studio

Some of you may have already seen the video from SQLBI showing the new timeline feature in Server Timings – if not, you should definitely watch this as it has some great information on this new feature and how to use it.

I’ve just pushed out an update to DAX Studio with a number of fixes and a few small updates. You can download it now from https://daxstudio.org

Updates

• Added query information button to traces
  (This captures the actual query text and any parameter values plus the ActivityID)
• Updated Query History icons
• #949 Exposed Theme/Mode setting in Options
• Added MPARAMETER keyword to syntax highlighting

Fixes

• Fixed #891 Error exporting to static Excel file
• Fixed #889 crash when dragging trace windows
• Fixed #886 incorrect link to tutorial in Getting Started dialog
• Fixed #894 Define and Expand sometimes producing incorrect output
• Fixed #924 username blank in All Queries trace
• Fixed #930 increased default code completion window width
• Fixed #931 automatically select all text in find/replace dialog
• Fixed #906 improved waterfall layout in Server Timings
• Fixed setting focus in the editor when changing tabs
• Fixed file icon registration
• Improved error handling around shutdown operations
• Added extra hotkey validation rules
• Fixed #916 added retry logic to all clipboard operations
• Improved Power BI filename detection for non-English cultures
• Removed unused dependencies and reduced installer/portable file size

I know it’s been a while since I’ve released an update to DAX Studio. But I’m happy to announce that version 3.0 is now available with a major update to the User Interface including the option for a Dark theme. You can download it from https://daxstudio.org (which has also had a major update and can be viewed in Dark mode) and you can read about what’s new in this release here: v3 Release | DAX Studio

DAX Studio 2.17.2 has just been released and the following is a run down of the new features and fixes that you will find in this release.

Apologies to anyone who attempted to download the 2.17.0 release – there was an update to the code signing tool and it failed to correctly sign the installer. The automated build has now been fixed so that it correctly signs the installer again.

New Features

Added Parameter support to Query Builder filters

The Query Builder now supports parameters. Typing an @ as the first character in a query builder filter value will switch the value into parameter mode and the following text will be treated as the parameter name. (typing @ a second time or clicking on the purple @ button will toggle the parameter back to the standard value mode)

When you run the query builder where a filter has a parameter you will be prompted for the parameter value just as if you had typed out a query that included a parameter reference. This allows you to build a query with parameters that can be pasted into a paginated report or any other tool that supports DAX parameters.

Removing <pii> tags from xmSQL in Server Timings to improve readability

Power BI and AzureAS have added <pii> tags around some of the text in the query events that DAX Studio captures as part of the Server Timings. These tags allow Microsoft to strip out information that could potentially be personally identifiable when writing them to centralized logs. But because DAX Studio does not send any of this information off your machine and because this information also includes important contextual information for troubleshooting and performance tuning we are just removing these tags to reduce the noise and improve readability.

Fixing accuracy of Server Timings for queries with Batch events

Prior to this update Storage Engine batch events timings were not being added to the SE duration figures. For a lot of models this difference is insignificant, but for large queries against large models this can result in an incorrect inflation of the FE duration. Keep an eye on the posts from Marco and Alberto at sqlbi.com as they are working on an in-depth video to explain this improvement to the Server Timings.

Query Builder queries are now captured in the query history

Prior to this update the Query History pane was only capturing the text of queries that had been typed into the query editor. Now the Query History pane captures any query that was executed regardless if it was from the edit window or from the Query Builder.

There is now an icon next to each query history row indicating where it was captured from and if you double click on a query that was originally run in the Query Builder it will be restored back into the Query Builder window

The /f parameter can now open vpax files

Now when you run DAX Studio from the command prompt the /f parameter will open either .dax or .vpax files.

Added extra information to the error message when the XMLA endpoint is not correctly enabled

If the Power BI XMLA endpoint is not properly enabled the Microsoft ADOMD provider returns a very generic error message making it hard to know what has gone wrong. DAX Studio now adds some extra text after the Microsoft error if you are attempting to connect to an XMLA endpoint and hit this generic WebException error to suggest you check the XMLA endpoint settings in your tenant.

Improved caching of measure expressions

Prior to this update features that required access to the text of the multiple measure expression such as the “Define All Measures” feature would request the expression text one at a time, now all of the measure expressions are retrieved in a single request.

Fixes

• Fixed #703 preventing a crash when entering a proxy password
• Fixed #715 added DOUBLE data type to intellisense and syntax highlighting
• Fixed #740 export to Excel failed on some machines
• Fixed #755 saving parameters to XML was not correctly encoding special characters
• Fixed #750 would crash on startup if the WMI information on the machine was corrupt
• Fixed download link in Help – About screen

DAX Studio v2.16.2 has just been released and is available at daxstudio.org. It includes the following fixes and improvements. The first one being particularly important:

Traces fail to start with a timeout error

Fixed issue #664 – A small refactoring of the trace engine for some future work has accidentally resulted in the engine not being able to detect if a trace has been started or not, resulting in timeout errors. This appears to affect most scenarios apart from one or two edge cases. Unfortunately it was one of those edge cases that was used when testing that the previous code change had not broken anything. The 2.16.2 code base has been tested against all the different engine types PowerPivot, Power BI Desktop, Power BI Desktop as an External Tool, a local SSAS Instance, a remote SSAS Instance, Power BI Premium XMLA Endpoints and Azure Analysis Services

Showing View Metrics Last Refreshed and Analysis Date in the local timezone

Fixed issue #663 – Previously the Last Data Refresh and Date of Analysis were both displayed in UTC in the Summary tab of the View Metrics pane. Internally the dates are still stored in the vpax file in UTC so that that if you send the vpax file to someone in a different timezone the times will n

When saving a file with the Query Builder open custom measure names were not saved

Fixed issue #659 – if you save a file with the query builder open which has custom measures that were created within the query builder then the name of those custom measures was not saving properly prior to this fix.

Debug commas not handling lines with indented comments correctly

Fixed issue #663 – the new debug commas preview feature was not correctly positioning the commas if one of the lines of the query had an indented comment. This issue and a few other ones around different comment placements have been fixed.

View Metrics – Last Refreshed date was incorrectly adjusting from UTC time

Fixed issue #670 – The Last Refreshed Datetime in the View Metrics summary page was incorrectly getting the timezone offset applied twice when calculating the UTC time. This resulted in the time being moved too far forward if your local timezone is behind UTC or too far back if your local timezone is ahead of UTC.

This update to DAX Studio includes all the new features introduced in 2.16.0 but includes the following bug fixes:

• #657 Unable to open a new query tab either with a new connection or with a copied connection
• #658 passing the database name on the command line
• #647 hidden objects not hidden correctly when show hidden objects option was turned off (this was partially fixed in 2.16.0 but should work in all scenarios now)

The next version of DAX Studio has just been released and you can get it from the home page at https://daxstudio.org

This release has actually ended up to be a bit larger than originally planned, but hopefully this means there will be something in here for everyone.

In addition to a number of bug fixes and smaller improvements, this version includes the following major features:

• Resilient Connections
• Native Excel output
• Clipboard results target
• New Options layout
• View Metrics improvements
• Query Builder improvements
• Prompt before refreshing metadata
• Export Data improvements

Read on for more detail about each of these.

New Features

Resilient Connections

This is one of the bigger features that hopefully no one will notice. I spent a few days re-architecting the internals of the connection management so that now every tab has it’s own ConnectionManager object and if a connection is broken for any reason the ConnectionManager will automatically attempt to re-connect to the same data source and database. This is particularly an issue for Azure Analysis Services and the XMLA endpoint for Power BI Premium where backend operations like deployments, scaling and model synch operations can cause sessions to be dropped. Whenever the connection is retried for any reason you will see a warning in the Output pane like the following.

If you see one of these warnings while you are doing anything involving performance tuning you should re-try the previous operation because at least part of the time would have been taken up by re-connecting to the data source.

Native Excel Output

As of v2.13 you can now output directly to a static XLSX file from the standalone version of DAX Studio (so no need to launch from the Excel add-in just to output data directly to an XLSX file). The existing csv export format was specifically optimized to work well in Excel, but I have heard that in the past people were sometimes using the Excel addin just to get output into a native Excel file. In addition this should be much more efficient on memory usage as the data gets streamed directly to the file and you do not need have to have Excel running.

To keep in synch with the Excel addin I have also added a “Linked” Excel output. This basically generates an ODC file with an embedded DAX query.

I had previously held off from implementing a native export to Excel as there was no good solution that did not involve generating the Excel file in memory before saving it to disk. But thanks to a new library called LargeXlsx it’s now possible for me to generate potentially huge files while maintaining a low memory footprint.

Although note that Excel files still cannot exceed 1 millions rows. That limitation is built-in to the file format.

Clipboard Output Target

In addition to the new Excel result targets we now also have a Clipboard target. When using this the results of any queries are sent directly to the Windows clipboard where you can paste them into another application.

New Options layout

Over the years I’ve added numerous settings to the options page in DAX Studio, but it’s now at the point where having everything visible on the one page does not work and it’s just too hard to find things. So I’ve re-built the Options page using a new framework that organises the settings into categories which can easily be browsed through and searched

View Metrics Improvements

There have been a number of small improvements to the View Metrics functionality in this release including:

• Added a Loading indicator. There was one in the status bar, but the Metrics view has been aligned to show the same sort of “busy” overlay as the other windows do.
• Fixed Sorting in View Metrics table view to do a nested sort and to sort Descending on first click
• View Metrics – Fixed KB/MB/GB (it was lowercase, which is for bits not bytes)
• Added Tooltips to most of the columns

Query Builder Improvements

The original filter patterns used by the query builder were copied from queries generated by Power BI Desktop and were in the form of

FILTER( KEEFILTERS( VALUES( <column> ), <condition> ))

this has been improved to produce more efficient queries with the following pattern

KEEPFILTERS( FILTER ( ALL( <column> ), <condition> ))

The Query Builder now also supports BETWEEN filters for dates and numeric columns and IN and NOT IN lists for text columns.

Prompt before refreshing

There is now an additional option in the automatic metadata refresh where you can ask DAX Studio to prompt before refreshing.

Export Improvements

The Data Export feature will now check if the data source supports the TOPNSKIP function and will use that if possible to export data in batches of 1 million rows at a time. This should allow us to export massive data volumes without triggering out of memory errors. I was able to do a test exporting 120 million rows from Power BI Desktop which generated a 20 GB csv file on my laptop (with 16 GB of RAM) and during the export Power BI stayed at around 1 GB of memory usage and DAX Studio hovered around 300 MB of memory usage.

Miscellaneous

The default file export format has been changed to csv instead of tab delimited since csv is probably a more common format and handles things like embedded line breaks better.

Fixes

• Fixed #400 duplicate New option in customize Quick Access Toolbar
• Fixed #401 unable to re-show Power BI Performance window after hiding it
• Fixed #405 / #419 incorrectly trying to write external tools file when doing a non-admin install
• Fixed crashes when right-clicking on certain tool windows
• Fixed #411 Export to csv not quoting strings
• Fixed #404 improved code completion interactions