Random Procrastination

Darren Gosbell

Tag: daxstudio (Page 2 of 2)

DAX Studio 2.15 Released

March 28, 2021 / / 3 Comments

This release includes a lot of small fixes, but hopefully I think I may have finally tracked down and fixed what was causing the code completion to randomly stop working.

You can get it from https://daxstudio.org

New Features

  • #559 Added a toolbar button and right-click menu to copy Server Timing metrics
  • #556 Added an option to play a sound after long running operations (this can be enabled in the Options menu)
  • Added “Duplicate Measure” right-click menu to Query Builder
  • Added Error events to All Queries trace, this can be helpful if you have another client tool that is generating invalid DAX or MDX
  • #568 Added right-click menu option in the editor to go to dax.guide for functions
  • #569 Added Function tooltip display when hovering the mouse over functions in the editor
  • Added setup cmdline parameter docs
  • Added SQLBI videos to docs
  • Added discussions link to website navigation
  • Updated Multiple Query Detection to work with 
    // Dax Query in addition to // SQL Query comments

Fixes

  • Adding extra checks around QueryEnd timeout in Server Timings
  • Close the Trace Layout ribbon tab when all documents are closed
  • Made ‘Add New’ disabled in the Query Builder if the current model has no tables
  • Fixed #458 added docs and tooltip to explain memory sizes
  • Fixed #517 updated clipboard bindings to allow for copying from the View Metrics tabs
  • Fixed #539 error starting traces when using Roles or EffectiveUserName
  • Fixed bug in retry for ViewMetrics when there is an error reading statistical information.
  • Added configuration to read statistical data for VertiPaq Analyzer. Disable reading statistical data for legacy versions of SSAS. Added retry logic and log of warning if there is an error reading statistical data.
  • Fixed #525 F1 and Context Menu to open dax.guide for functions
  • Fixed server timings trace for PowerPivot
  • Fixed drag drop issues with QueryBuilder
  • Fixed #514 Server Trace not working in Excel
  • Fixed #520 option to not truncate tables was not working when exporting to SQL Server
  • Fixed #511 Excessive metadata refreshes was causing metadata pane to collapse
  • Fixed #512 fixed Table tooltip warnings and added measure count
  • Fixed #546 corrected wording in error message
  • Fixed #549 correctly escape connection string values containing special characters
  • Fixed #557 delimiter error on Clear Cache when using non-US delimiter style
  • Fixed a bug with the Roles parameter in the advanced connection properties not accepting spaces
  • Fixed #563 metadata incorrectly resetting when using a combination of mouse selection and query builder hotkeys
  • Fixed #564 Application crashes when clicking on a ribbon tab while the ribbon is collapsed
  • Fixed crash when resetting key bindings
  • Fixed #575 autocomplete sometimes stops working
  • Disabled the Add Measure button when connected to a model with no tables
  • Fixed #576 Editing an existing Measure in Query Builder against PowerPivot causes a crash

DAX Studio v2.13 released

October 21, 2020 / / 4 Comments

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

Options are grouped by categories
You can now search for options

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

DAX Studio and Tabular Editor – better together

August 25, 2020 / / 0 Comments

I love love the way Phil Seamark likes to push the art of the possible with the Microsoft BI platform. And I really liked his recent article on using VS Code to query a Power BI file and generate measures. But as I was reading that blog post I could not help but think that it was going to be outside of the comfort zone of a lot of Power BI users.

I know a lot of BI developers that have strong skills in DAX, Power Query and SQL, but don’t often use C# and many of them don’t use VS Code and have not heard of nuget. So this made me wonder if there was a another way of doing the same thing with the tools that many BI developers already use like DAX Studio and Tabular Editor

I actually figured out a couple of approaches to achieving the same result as Phil. The first one uses the following 2 pieces of information.

  1. Tabular Editor has a brilliant feature called Advanced Scripting which lets you run little pieces of C# code and is an excellent way of automating changes in your models. And in addition to being able to use the standard properties and methods Daniel has build a series of helpful “helper” methods like AddMeasure which has parameters for <Name>, <Expression> and <Folder>.
  2. As I showed in my previous post where I generated part of a DAX query using another DAX query. It is possible with some careful string manipulation to use DAX to generate other code such as the C# using in the Tabular Editor Advance Scripting feature.

If we combine the two pieces of information above we end up with the following query which generates a Tabular Editor AddMeasure() call for each value in Product[Color].

EVALUATE 
ADDCOLUMNS(
VALUES('Product'[Color])
,"ScriptExpression"
,var _color = 'Product'[Color] 
var _name = "Sum of " & _color & " Sales Amount"
var _expression = "CALCULATE(SUM('Sales'[Sales Amount]) ,'Product'[Color] = \""" & _color & "\"")"                     
return "Model.Tables[""Sales""].AddMeasure( """ & _name & """, """ & _expression & """, ""AutoMeasures"");"
)

When you open DAX Studio from the External Tools menu and run this query you get output that looks like the following and you can selected the “ScriptExpression” column and copy that.

Then you open Tabular Editor from the External Tools menu. Click on the Advanced Scripting tab and paste in the output from the “ScriptExpression” column. Note this may include the “ScriptExpression” column header at the top which you will need to delete.

(note to self, I should add a “copy without headers” option to DAX Studio, there is an option for this, but it would be nice to add it to the right-click menu on the results)

Then when you click “run” (1) on the advance script, you will see a folder with all your new measures appear (2). You can then check that the expression has been entered correctly and click save (3) to make these appear back in Power BI Desktop.

Stay tuned for the next post in this series where I will show another technique for doing this.

DAX Studio 2.11.1 Release

June 18, 2020 / / 0 Comments

I just published a point release for DAX Studio that fixes the following bugs. You can get it from https://daxstudio.org

Fixes

  • Filters on datetime columns where we cannot parse the date value now report the error rather than crashing when using the “Edit Query” button
  • #343 Fixed spelling of KEEPFILTERS for IS NOT filters in the new Query Builder
  • #345 Comma placement changed to match the style used by DaxFormatter
  • #346 / #347 DaxFormatter now works in the Expression Editor
  • #351 error while exporting tables to SQL Server
  • #352 hierarchies in display folders not expanding
  • #357 leading/trailing comments missing when doing “define measure”

DAX Studio 2.11.0 Released

June 9, 2020 / / 7 Comments

The 2.11.0 release of DAX Studio is now available and brings with it the following new features and fixes.

New Preview Features

There are 2 new preview features this month, so you need to go into Options > Advanced and enable them if you want to use them

Query Builder

When enabled, the Query Builder appears as a button in the main ribbon

It lets you drag and drop columns and measures to build up a query which can include basic filters. You can also add custom measures or override the expression of a measure from your data model.

Query Builder animation

You can either run the content of the query builder directly or you can click the “Edit Query” button to send the text for the query to the main editor window where you can run it or further customize it.

Query Benchmark

The Query Benchmark tool appears as a button on the Advanced ribbon. It allows you to run a given query a number of times both against a cold and warm cache. This is useful because even on a quiet development server there can be a number of factors that can cause variability in the server timings.

The Benchmark feature makes use of the Server Timings functionality to record detailed information about each query execution.

You get the option of how many runs of cold vs warm cache (and by default these are linked)

The output of a Benchmark run shows a summary view with the Avg, StdDev, Min and Max of both runs for the Total Duration and the Storage Engine Duration

The detailed output shows the timings of every single query execution.

New Features

In addition to the two big features above there are a number of smaller features that have been added in 2.11.0

  • #314 Added 3 Quick Access buttons for
    • New
    • New (with current connection)
    • Save
  • #277 Added Export button to all trace outputs
  • Added full filename tooltip to tabs (thanks @dmarkle)
  • Promoted View Metrics (Vertipaq Analyzer) from preview status to general availability
  • Promoted Export Data feature from preview status to general availability
  • Documentation Updates:
    • Added license page
    • including a section on SmartScreen issues in Win10 (thanks to Gilbert at fourmoo.com )
  • Updated syntax highlighting to align with DaxFormatter.com
  • Added a note in the Database tooltip that the Database Id can be copied using a right-click
  • Added formatting to shorten asazure: and powerbi: server names in the status bar so that the key information is visible
  • Added a partitions tab to the Model Metrics views
  • Added a sample of any missing keys to the relationships tab in the Model Metrics (these keys are not saved for privacy reasons when exporting to a vpax file)

Fixes

  • fixed cancelling of exports to SQL Server
  • improved keyboard navigation by adding IsDefault/IsCancel properties to dialog buttons (thanks @dmarkle)
  • fixed an issue with intellisense not re-enabling after reconnecting (thanks @dmarkle)
  • fixed an issue with Query History pane not updating the “Current” Database filter when changing databases
  • disabled external tools when connected to PowerPivot
  • #290 updated all URL references to use https (thanks @warthurton)
  • #291 fixed issue connecting from Excel 2010
  • #301 refined the code completion to prevent it overwriting code when editing in the middle of an expression
  • #302 disabled column re-ordering in Metrics view
  • #303 fixed an issue with the metadata pane when connecting to a model with dynamic format strings defined in calculation groups
  • #308 removed backtick characters in column names with spaces where using the Static Excel output
  • #320 fixed server not found error when exporting vpax file for PowerPivot models
  • #325 fixed error when attempting to connect to PowerPivot files stored on OneDrive
  • #329 fixed incorrect database name shown when launched from the Excel addin and not connected to PowerPivot
  • #330 fixed the status message getting stuck after writing output to a file destination
  • #339 fixed a bug that reported an assembly load error when Cancelling a query

DAX Studio 2.10.2 Released

January 21, 2020 / / 0 Comments

I’ve just released the 2.10.2 update to DAX Studio.

Starting with the 2.10.0 releases the crash reporting has been improved as there was previously an edge case where certain types of crashes were not triggering the crash report dialog. So this release includes a number of stability updates that have come from people submitting crash reports.

There are also a few smaller features that are detailed below

New Features

  • #274 Adding Editor Word Wrap to options screen
  • #270 Added option to display current user in title bar
  • Added Dax Formatter option to omit spaces after function names

Fixes

  • fixed crash when selecting PBI / SSDT connection, but not selecting a file
  • fixed crash when running a query that produces no rows and using the Static Excel Output
  • fixed #272 Vertipaq Analyzer not working if any tables have a single quote in the name
  • fixed a number of crashes reported via the crash report dialog
  • improved a number of background threading calls to use the simpler async/await pattern
  • moved checking for schema changes on activating DAX Studio to a background thread to prevent the UI freezing for slow connections (AAS) or if there are active commit locks.

DAX Studio 2.10.1 release

December 20, 2019 / / 2 Comments

It seems that the last few years I’ve always seemed to do a pre-Christmas release for DAX Studio and this year is no different. The latest update of DAX Studio has just been released which includes a number of new features and bug fixes which are outlined below.

You can download the latest release from https://daxstudio.org

Database Tooltip

Database Tooltip

When you hover over the database dropdown in the metadata pane we now display an informational tooltip which includes the compatibility level of the database, the culture of the database and the date the data was last refreshed.

New Options

A couple of new settings have been added File – Options screen

The first lets you configure whether the editor inserts tabs or spaces when you indent code. This can be useful if you use other code editors and wish to keep a consistent style across them all.

The second lets you configure a custom export format by specifying a delimiter to use and whether or not to always quote string fields (however if your strings include your delimiter field they will still be automatically quoted as not doing this would not allow the file to be consumed properly).

This configuration appears as an option when you save query results to a file target or when you use the Export Data Wizard

Vertipaq Analyzer

A new Summary Pane has been added to the Vertipaq Analyzer view. This page gives the user a single place to see summary information about the model including the total number of tables and the total size of the model.

The tables pane now has a new column that indicates if any of the relationships for that table have RI violations. This uses the DMV that Phil Seamark pointed out in his recent blog post

You can now also import metrics that were previously exported

Date Table indicator

The metadata pane has been updated to indicate if a table has been marked as a “Date” table.

Ribbon buttons for Issues and Feature requests

I have seen a few issues posted in various other forums like the Power BI community forum over the years so I’ve decided to add buttons to the help ribbon to allow a quick and direct way of posting issues directly to our github issues list (although a github login is still required)

Search for Functions and DMVs

Both the Function and DMV panes now have a search box.

Fixes

And in addition to the above features it includes numerous bug fixes including the following:

  • #224 Server Timings and Query Plan traces now work with the EffectiveUsername connection string parameter
  • #237 fixed population of UserName field in traces
  • #223 Export Wizard now replaces characters that are not legal in file names with underscores
  • #222 UTF-8 csv exports no longer include BOM characters
  • #218 Vertipaq Analyzer – fixed an issue trying to export a model with a multiple of 50 +1 columns
  • #238 Vertipaq Analyzer – fixed Column Header name for Data Type column
  • Vertipaq Analyzer – fixed not showing any output for certain models #235 #231 #218
  • #213 fixed a bug that was not allowing “DEFINE MEASURE” to work with KPIs
  • #241 fixed File – New creating 2 blank windows (thanks @Mankarse)
  • #226 removed OnDragEnter debug message

Known Issues

There is an ongoing issue with some people getting an error from the Excel Add-in reporting a MissingMethodException which is preventing connections to PowerPivot models. However I’ve double checked a copy of the dll in question and it does contain the method so this error does not make any sense. And I have been unable to reproduce this issue on any of the systems which I have access to. If anyone is able to assist with more information on how to reproduce this issue I’d love to hear from you as I’d like to get this issue fixed.

Newer posts »

© 2024 Random Procrastination

Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑