Performance testing

Given that DAX measures can implement complex business logic and are dynamically calculated as users interact with reports, the performance of these calculations is a critical component of providing a good user experience.

There are often many available methods of implementing business logic and custom filter contexts into DAX measures. Although these alternatives deliver the essential functional requirements, they can have very different performance characteristics, which can ultimately impact user experience and the scalability of a dataset.

When migrating a self-service dataset to a corporate solution or preparing a large and highly utilized dataset, it’s always a good practice to test common queries and the DAX measures used by those queries.

For example, the same common dimension grouping (for example, Product Category and Year) and the same filter context (Year = 2018) could produce dramatically different performance results based on the...