Chris Webb's BI Blog

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Here’s a situation I’ve found myself in many times.

In case you haven’t already seen the blog post on the Power BI blog or the discussion on LinkedIn, we at Microsoft published a new white paper last week to help you decide which storage mode to use when you’re using Power BI to create semantic models and…

Several years ago I wrote a very popular blog post about how to store images for your reports inside your Power BI semantic model.

There’s so much going on in the Fabric community that it can be hard to keep up with it all.

In last week’s post I mentioned that while Power BI reports (unlike Excel PivotTables) do not support the Detail Rows Expression feature, it is possible to partially work around this limitation by using the paginated report visual.

If you have a DirectQuery fact table in Power BI you can use user-defined aggregations to improve query performance; querying a smaller, summarised copy of your data in an Import mode aggregation table is always going to be faster than querying a large fa…

This week there was another big Copilot-related announcement for Power BI – but on the Excel blog.

This was a big week for Power BI Copilot with the announcement of a new direction for the feature.

This week, in the announcement about support for Fabric Pipelines in Workspace Monitoring, I noticed that it came with an Operations Agent that actively monitors and analyses Pipeline activity.

This is a blog post I’ve been meaning to write for a long time.

A few months ago I wrote about a rare error – the “Maximum allowable memory allocation” error – that may occur when the physical machine, or node, that a semantic model is running on in the Power BI Service comes under memory pressure.