Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/darrengosbell/archive/2015/06/24/announcing-dax-studio-2.2.0.aspx
Today we released DAX Studio 2.2 which includes a number of big enhancements.
You can download the new release from http://daxstudio.codeplex.com/releases
Below is an outline of the new functionality you will find in this release.
Intellisense
DAX Studio now has intellisense support, it's a fairly basic implementation, but I think I've got it working fairly smoothly. Note that it’s based on the best practice of always prefixing columns with the tablename and never prefixing a measure with a table name. So if you type ‘table name’[ you will get intellisense for all the columns in the ‘table name’ table. But if you just type [ you will be presented with a list of all the measures in the model.
The intellisense brings up table, column and measure metadata information from the current model:
As well as functions and keywords, including the descriptions for functions. The function metadata is coming from the DICOVER_FUNCTIONS dmv so it should accurately reflect the capabilities of the current data source (So you will see some additional functions when connected to newer data sources such as Power BI Designer):
Tracing (Query Plans & Server Timings)
One of the most significant new features is support for the tracing features (Server TIming & Query Plans) against PowerPivot. This has involved a significant amount of work re-building the internal code which handles this, but the end effect is that the Query Plan and Server Timings buttons are now enabled when connected to a PowerPivot model.
We've also altered the layout of the server timings information
I found when I was reading the results that I was always comparing Total Duration vs Total CPU and comparing the ratio of these two figures, so I've added a little "parallelism factor" under the Total CPU. I also found that I was looking to compare FE vs SE duration and the number of SE Queries to the number of SE Cache hits, so I've moved them onto the same lines.
Support for Multi-Dimensional SSAS Servers
Although it’s a little bit of a novelty, DAX Studio now properly supports connecting to multi-dimensional servers. This kind of worked previously if the default database for your multi-dimensional instance only had a single cube, but threw an error if it had multiple cubes. I’m now injected in a CUBE= parameter in the connection string when connected to a multi-dimensional server so this should no longer be an issue.
Support for Multiple Power BI Designer instances
We now have support for multiple instances of Power BI Designer, so if you have more than one copy of the designer open you can see the names of the .pibx files that you have open and choose which one to connect to.
Highlighting of unnatural hierarchies
Unnatural hierarchies can have a negative impact on performance so we highlight those in the metadata pane.
Bug Fixes
There have been a number of minor bugs that have been fixed along the way, including a number that were not officially reported, but were discovered during testing.
FIXED - Doubling up of backslash characters when using DAX Formatter
FIXED - Unable to connect to SSAS servers when not an administrator
FIXED - changing the connection for a query window would sometimes throw an error
FIXED - source database changing on metadata refresh when connected to a SSAS server
FIXED - cannot connect to a PowerPivot model where the file path contains single quotes
Known Issues
The following issue which was first identified in 2.1.1 still remains:
"Linked Table" output for the Excel add-in only works for PowerPivot models if there is at least one table in the model that was created by linking data from an Excel table. We have not been able to find a workaround to this yet, it looks like it might be due to a bug in the Excel object model.
Enjoy!