Power BI Chaos: Why DAX Breaks You (And SQL Saves You)!

How to build dashboards that don’t implode under wild formulas

Author

Glenda Carnate
September 19, 2025

Read time: 2.5 minutes

Power BI gets hype for its visual magic, but the reality for many teams is messy.

A recent Knowi report (“The Ultimate Power BI Review 2025”) calls out that Power BI is beginner-friendly for simple dashboards, but the moment you add complex modeling or try to scale via DAX, the learning curve shoots through the roof.

You start with good intentions: clean metrics, simple visuals. Two hours later, you’ve got nested FILTERs, ALL() scattered everywhere, and someone muttering “why is this failing?”

The Harsh Reality of Power BI Development:

  • Every developer swears they’ll keep DAX simple, but complexity creeps in quickly once you combine context transitions, row filters, and custom logic.

  • Reports often end up being debugging nightmares: one tweak breaks something else, and only the original author knows why.

  • Non-technical stakeholders lose trust when dashboards behave unpredictably or take an excessive amount of time to load changes.

  • Scaling to more users or more data often magnifies the chaos: what worked for one metric collapses when reused elsewhere without a framework.

Key Takeaways for Smarter BI:

1. Prep heavy logic in SQL — do large aggregations, data cleansing, transformations upstream, so downstream Power BI work remains lighter and maintainable.

2. Use DAX sparingly for sparkle, not structure — measures and small calculations are fine; avoid embedding full ETL-style work in DAX if you can.

3. Establish reusable frameworks — templates, shared models, naming conventions, modular components so the code base doesn’t get tangled.

4. Avoid ego-driven formulas — complex ≠ clever. Clean, documented, simple logic wins trust and maintainability.

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