A while back I was chatting with Shannon Lindsay on Twitter. She shares lots of useful Power BI tips there. She shared her syntax tip of the & operator being used for concatenation and the && operator being used for boolean AND, which reminded me about implicit conversions and blanks in DAX.
Before you read the below tweet, see how many of these you can guess correctly:
Blank + 5 = ?
Blank * 5 = ?
5 / Blank = ?
0 / Blank = ?
In DAX, Blank is converted to 0 in addition and subtraction.
What about boolean logic? Do you know the result of the following expressions?
AND(True(), Blank()) = ? OR(True(), Blank()) = ? AND(False(), Blank()) = ? AND(Blank(), Blank()) = ?
You can see the results as well as a few more permutations in the screenshot below.
Why does this matter?
You need to understand the impact of blanks in your data. Do you really want to divide by zero when you are missing data? If you are performing a boolean AND, and your data is blank, are you ok with showing a result of False? Remember that your expression may produce undesired results rather than an error.
First, you need to be aware of where it is possible in your data to get a blank input. When you are writing your DAX measures, you may need to handle blanks. DAX offers the IFERROR() function to check if the result of an expression throws an error. There is also an ISBLANK() function that you can use to check for a blank value and a COALESCE() function to provide an alternate value when a blank value is detected.
But adding extra logic in your measures may have a performance impact. For example, the DIVIDE() function can handle divide by zero errors for you. But DIVIDE() may be slower than the / operator. The performance difference is highly dependent on your data. Alternatively, you can use an IF statement to check if an input value is greater than zero using the > operand. This can be quicker than checking for blanks or errors using other functions.
At the end of the day, producing the correct result is more important than fast performance, but we strive to achieve both. If you have any tips for handling blanks in DAX, please share them in the comments.
