DAX Studio is a lightweight (5 MB), open source client tool for executing DAX queries against Power BI datasets and other sources which share the Microsoft Analysis Services Tabular database engine, such as SSAS in Tabular mode and Azure Analysis Services. DAX Studio exposes the metadata of the source model (for example, tables, measures, hierarchies), includes reference panes for DAX functions and Tabular Dynamic Management Views (DMVs), and also provides query formatting, syntax highlighting, and IntelliSense for developing DAX queries. Additionally, DAX Studio supports performance tuning as it can execute traces against its data sources and displays useful performance statistics, as well as the query plans used to execute the query.

For these reasons, despite improvements to DAX authoring in SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS), DAX Studio is very commonly used by Microsoft BI developers in Analysis Services and Power BI environments. Specifically, BI developers will store the DAX queries created within DAX Studio as .dax or .msdax files and later open these files from DAX studio for performance testing or troubleshooting scenarios. For example, a team may have a DAX query that returns the count of rows for three fact tables of a data model by calendar date, and use this query to troubleshoot issues related to a data-loading process. Additionally, just as M queries saved within .pq files can be added to version control systems, DAX query files can be added to version control systems, such as Visual Studio Team Services.

DAX Studio can be downloaded from http://daxstudio.org.