Features Intro
This section lists of all the features in DAX Studio.
Traces
6 items
Options
4 items
Command Line - dscmd.exe
5 items
Delta Analyzer
1 item
Comment Script
16 items
Bracket Matching
DAX queries can get quite involved and can include deep levels of nested brackets. DAX Studio helps you with this by highlighting matching brackets.
Capture Diagnostics
Capture Diagnostics is designed as a way to capture diagnostic information about 1 or more queries in a single file. This file can then be used for later analysis.
Videos
The SQLBI youtube channel is a great place to learn about all sorts of DAX and Tabular engine topics. They also have a playlist of short videos dedicated to DAX Studio as part of their DAX Tools courses.
Clear on Run
This is a toggle button, when it is enabled it will automatically execute a Clear Cache command before running a query. This is useful in performance tuning situations where you want to tune for the worst case scenario.
Connection Dialog
The connection dialog in DAX Studio provides the ability to connect to:
Database Dialog
The database dialog is shown when connecting to a data source which has more than one database / semantic model.
DaxFormatter.com Support
DAX Studio has built-in support for formatting queries using www.daxformatter.com (so you must have an internet connection in order to format a query)
Define Measure
When you right-click on a measure in the metadata pane there are a number of options available for defining measures
DMV List
This tab shows a list of all of the available DMVs. Dragging a DMV over to the query editor gives you a basic "SELECT * FROM ..." query for that DMV.
Editor Help Text
For people that are new to writing DAX queries it can be tricky to know how to get started with your writing your first query. To make this experience easier we have added some help text that displays when the main edit window is empty. This text will automatically disappear as soon as you start typing or you can turn it off permanently using the tick box at the bottom
Excel - Linked Results
This output option is only available when DAX Studio is launched from the Excel Addin
Excel - Static Results
This output option is only available when DAX Studio is launched from the Excel Addin
Export Data
This feature gives you the ability to export entire tables from your data model to either CSV files, PARQUET files or to SQL Server
File Menu
The DAX Studio File menu gives you access to open .dax and .msdax file. It also contains a list of recently used files and gives you access to the options menu.
Find/Replace
Find
Flexible Layout
DAX Studio incorporates a docking control which allows you to move documents and tool windows around to suit your personal taste.
Function Metadata
This tab displays a list of all the available DAX functions.
Indent Based Code Folding
DAX Studio does not have a fully featured DAX parser making some features like code folding impossible to implement correctly, but this feature provides an interesting work around which works for "well formatted" DAX code by allowing the code to be collapsed based on indentation levels. This does allow for some interesting use cases where you can indent a block of code from a long query and collapse it so that you can view just the portions of code that are of interest to you in a single screen.
Code Completion Support
DAX Studio provides full code completion support
Load Power BI Performance Data
As of May 2019 Power BI Desktop has the ability to run a Performance Analyzer (which can be displayed via the View ribbon)
MDX Support
In addition to running DAX queries you can also execute MDX queries from DAX Studio.
Metadata Panes
DAX Studio has 3 different metadata panes. With all the metadata panes you can either double click on an item to insert it into the current position of the editor or you can drag the item and drop it in a selected position in the query pane.
Model Diagram
The Model Diagram is a preview feature. You need to turn it on in
Model Metadata
Tabular Analysis Services models and Power Pivot models have the ability to be queried from multi-dimensional and tabular clients. This feature displays the metadata in a Tabular format and when you double-click or drag items off the metadata pane onto the query pane you will get the tabular name format.
Model Metrics
DAX Studio has the ability to analyze your data model and report on the memory usage. This can be extremely helpful when performance tuning as the more memory your data structures require, the slower they are to both process and query.
Multiple Queries Detected dialog
This dialog is displayed when pasting in text copied from the Power BI Performance Analyzer which contains both the DAX query generated by Power BI plus any additional query generated from a DirectQuery connection. If you are connected to the main report data model the secondary query is not as useful as the initial DAX query since it cannot be executed against the main report data model, so this dialog gives you the option to automatically strip out the second query. You can choose an option for a default behaviour or you can choose to be prompted any time such a query is pasted
Multiple Tabs
DAX Studio supports multiple tabs, the user interface is multi-threaded so you can have a query running in one window while you work on a different query in another window.
Output Modes
output modes
Output Panes
There are 3 different output panes in DAX Studio
Parameter Support
DAX Studio has a number of features that make working with parameters in DAX queries easier.
Privacy Settings
The privacy options exist to allow users to turn off some or all of the internet based functionality. This allows people with highly sensitive information in their data models to eliminate the possibility of any of this information being sent outside of their organization.
Publish Functions
There are two buttons available in the Advanced tab of the Options window. These buttons exist to help support the https://dax.guide website.
Query Builder
The query builder provides a drag and drop interface for building queries against your data model.
Query Editor
The query editor pane is where you enter the queries that you want DAX Studio to execute.
Result Formatting
When the results of a DAX query are returned they come back in a "raw", unformatted format and it is then up to the client tool to apply any formatting. In the case of client tools like Power BI Desktop where the tool is generating the DAX query this is not hard since the tool knows exactly how to map a column in the results to the source column, but with DAX Studio it gets a lot trickier since the user can type in an arbitrary query with any structure they like.
DAX Studio Ribbon
The ribbon in DAX Studio is split into a number of functional groups
Run Benchmark
The benchmarking feature provides an automated way of running a query a number of times with a cold and warm cache and then collecting detailed timing information.
Run Modes
run modes
Server FE Benchmark
The FE Benchmark feature runs a standard formula engine only query against the current data source. It produces a FE Benchmark number that should help in estimating the expected performance in production.
Smart Paste
When pasting DAX queries in from other sources it is possible that the text may have issues which requires fixing before the queries can be run.
Standard Hotkeys
In addition to the user definable hotkeys documented here the following standard hotkeys are available.
Startup Parameters
This page documents the command line parameters accepted by daxstudio.exe itself when you launch
Status Bar
The statusbar in DAX Studio contains a number of useful bits of information
Swap Delimiters
In Excel and Power BI DAX supports 2 styles of delimiters:
Timer Results
Timer Results
Version notifications
When it starts up DAX Studio will periodically check whether an updated release is available.
View As
The View As option can be found in the Advanced tab and enables easy testing of RLS roles