The Five Pillars of DAX | Daten-WG Podcast with Francesco Bergamaschi

Francesco Bergamaschi joins from Italy to talk about DAX: the language at the core of every Power BI model, and the one most people feel they half-understand at best. We get into why calculated columns are just a tool and not a sin, the one rule that fixes most DAX performance problems, how to use ALLSELECTED without getting burned, and Francesco's teaching method – the five pillars of DAX and the path from a simple column to the measure magic. Along the way: why CALCULATE beats variables for beginners, why DAX is "honest", how it compares to SQL, and whether DAX still matters in the age of AI. Francesco Bergamaschi   / francescobergamaschi   Artur König   / datakoenigartur   Meet Francesco and learn the five Pillars of DAX at the 14th and 15th October in Cologne: https://www.daten-wg.com/details-regi... https://www.daten-wg.com/daten-wg-2026 00:00 – Intro: an Italian DAX pro and why DAX tutorials all have an Italian accent 04:08 – Calculated columns: just another tool, not a sin 05:45 – Calculated tables and the danger of materializing whole tables 07:24 – Learning DAX in 2012, before Marco and Alberto's first book 09:03 – ALLSELECTED: how to use it without getting burned 11:03 – How do you teach DAX in a single day? 11:30 – The five pillars of DAX 13:19 – The teaching path: from columns to tables to the measure magic 21:10 – CALCULATE as the magic box – and why it beats variables for beginners 22:21 – "Variables are constant" and what makes DAX honest 24:56 – DAX vs SQL: three lines instead of twenty 25:26 – A language for the business user, not for storage 27:26 – The CALCULATE algorithm: a genuinely beautiful piece of engineering 30:13 – The Definitive Guide to ALLSELECTED – and getting a note added to it 32:01 – Is DAX still relevant in the age of AI? A new book from Marco and Alberto 33:56 – On the road: SQLBits, Data Point Prague, and a stop in Cologne 35:20 – Closing: paper, pencil, and good books Links and sources kubisco – Francesco's consultancy and DAX blog: https://www.kubisco.com/ The Definitive Guide to DAX, Third Edition (Marco Russo & Alberto Ferrari): https://www.sqlbi.com/books/the-defin... The Definitive Guide to ALLSELECTED (SQLBI article): https://www.sqlbi.com/articles/the-de... SQLBI: https://www.sqlbi.com/ DAX Studio: https://daxstudio.org/ Data Point Prague 2026: https://datapointprague.cz/ SQLBits: https://sqlbits.com/