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


- why CALCULATE beats variables for beginners,


- why DAX is "honest" and how it compares to SQL,


- whether DAX still matters in the age of AI


...and Francesco's teaching method – the five pillars of DAX and
the path from a simple column to the measure magic.





Francesco Bergamaschi
https://www.linkedin.com/in/francescobergamaschi/


Artur König


https://www.linkedin.com/in/datakoenigartur/





Meet Francesco and learn the five Pillars of DAX at the 14th and
15th October in Cologne:


https://www.daten-wg.com/details-registrierung/all-in-dax-pillars-en


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-definitive-guide-to-dax-third-edition/


The Definitive Guide to ALLSELECTED (SQLBI article):
https://www.sqlbi.com/articles/the-definitive-guide-to-allselected/


SQLBI: https://www.sqlbi.com/


DAX Studio: https://daxstudio.org/


Data Point Prague 2026: https://datapointprague.cz/


SQLBits: https://sqlbits.com/