Public preview of calculation groups in Azure Analysis Services
Published date: June 10, 2019
We are pleased to announce calculation groups are now officially in public preview for Azure Analysis Services! Calculation groups were announced for SQL Server Analysis Services 2019 in the CTP 2.3 blog post and will soon be supported in Power BI Premium through the XMLA endpoint.
Calculation groups address the issue of measure proliferation in complex BI models often caused by common calculations like time-intelligence. It is not uncommon for Analysis Services models to have hundreds of base measures. Each base measure often requires the same time-intelligence analysis. This can easily explode the number of measures and can create the following problems.
- The user experience is overwhelming because must sift through so many measures
- DAX is difficult to maintain
- Model metadata is bloated
Calculation groups address these issues. They are presented to end-users as a table with a single column. Each value in the column represents a reusable calculation that can be applied to any of the measures where it makes sense. By reducing the number of measures, calculation groups present an uncluttered user interface to end users. Users simply select calculation groups in the field list to view the calculations in Power BI visuals. As shown by the following animation, there is no need for the end user or modeler to create separate measures.
Please use the following link for detailed information on how to set up calculation groups in Azure Analysis Services.
https://aka.ms/CalculationGroups