How we stopped wasting $93,600 per year searching for measures we’d already built
16 min readJust now
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DAX Measure Library Architecture
The Slack message appeared at 2:37 PM on a Tuesday.
“Hey, do we have a measure for customer lifetime value? I can’t find it.”
I knew we had it. Somewhere. I’d built it myself three months ago for the sales dashboard.
I opened the model. Scrolled through the measures pane. 147 measures. No organization. No folders. Just an alphabetical wall of text.
[Customer LTV]? Nope. [LTV]? Not there. [Lifetime Value]? Missing.
After 20 minutes of searching, I found it: [CLV_Total_Final_v2]
My colleague’s response: “Why didn’t you just rebuild it? Would’ve been faster.”
He was right...
How we stopped wasting $93,600 per year searching for measures we’d already built
16 min readJust now
–
Press enter or click to view image in full size
DAX Measure Library Architecture
The Slack message appeared at 2:37 PM on a Tuesday.
“Hey, do we have a measure for customer lifetime value? I can’t find it.”
I knew we had it. Somewhere. I’d built it myself three months ago for the sales dashboard.
I opened the model. Scrolled through the measures pane. 147 measures. No organization. No folders. Just an alphabetical wall of text.
[Customer LTV]? Nope. [LTV]? Not there. [Lifetime Value]? Missing.
After 20 minutes of searching, I found it: [CLV_Total_Final_v2]
My colleague’s response: “Why didn’t you just rebuild it? Would’ve been faster.”
He was right. And that’s when I realized something was fundamentally broken.
We had spent months building a library of reusable calculations, and nobody could find anything in it.
What’s the point of building measures if your team can’t use them? What’s the benefit of creating sophisticated DAX if it gets rebuilt from scratch in every new model because nobody knows it exists?