We are excited to share that Direct Lake datasets now support calculation groups. Direct Lake datasets can directly access Lakehouse tables in Microsoft Fabric giving you amazing report performance without having to schedule a refresh or move data. And calculation groups are a powerful feature that allow you to define dynamic calculations to be applied to existing measures. For example, you can create a calculation group that applies time intelligence functions such as year-to-date, quarter-to-date, or month-to-date to any measure in your model. Learn more at aka.ms/calculationgroups.
To use calculation groups with Direct Lake datasets, you will need to use XMLA endpoints or XMLA-based tools such as SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) or external tools like the Tabular Editor open-source community tool. You can find more details on how to use XMLA endpoints with Direct Lake datasets in this blog post: Announcing XMLA Write support for Direct Lake datasets | Microsoft Fabric Blog | Microsoft Fabric. Please note that once you edit a Direct Lake dataset with XMLA, you will currently not be able to use the “Open data model” option in the Power BI service.
If you want to learn more about Direct Lake and how it enables you to build large-scale semantic models in Power BI, check out Learn about Direct Lake in Power BI and Microsoft Fabric – Power BI | Microsoft Learn.
We hope you enjoy this new capability with your Direct Lake datasets in Microsoft Fabric, and we look forward to hearing your feedback.