Hard PL-300 practice questions

You have a star schema with a Sales fact table related to Product and Customer dimensions. A new requirement asks that slicing by Product also filters a separate Inventory fact table that shares the Product dimension. A colleague suggests setting the Sales-to-Product relationship cross-filter direction to 'Both' to make this work. What is the most likely consequence of enabling bidirectional cross-filtering on this dimension relationship?

You maintain a Power BI model with 12 base measures (Total Sales, Total Cost, Total Profit, etc.). Business users want each measure to be viewable as Current, Year-to-Date (YTD), Prior Year, and Year-over-Year % without you creating 48 separate measures. You want a maintainable solution that applies these time-intelligence variations to any measure a user places on a visual. Which modeling feature should you implement?

You are building a Power BI model with a large fact table (Sales) that stays in DirectQuery mode against an Azure SQL Database for near-real-time reporting. A small Product dimension table is used both in slicers and in relationships with the DirectQuery fact table. Slicer interactions are slow because every selection sends a query to the source. You want fast slicer responses while still supporting efficient joins to the DirectQuery fact table. Which storage mode should you set on the Product table?

You are building a Power BI report for a retail company. The fact data resides in a Microsoft Fabric lakehouse as Delta tables and totals over 500 million rows that are refreshed several times per day. Business users require near real-time reporting and interactive report performance similar to Import mode, but you must avoid duplicating the large dataset into the semantic model. Which storage mode should you use for the semantic model?

You maintain a Power BI model with a fact table named Sales containing a [Total Sales] measure, and a marked Date table related to Sales on the OrderDate column. Management wants a measure that shows the running total of sales from the first day of the fiscal year (starting July 1) through the current date in the report context. Which DAX expression should you use?

Your organization uses a Power BI deployment pipeline with Development, Test, and Production stages, each mapped to a separate workspace. A group of report developers must be able to build content and promote items from Development to Test, but they must NOT be able to deploy to the Production stage or modify content in the Production workspace. Only two release managers should perform deployments into Production. What is the recommended way to enforce this?

Your team uses a Power BI deployment pipeline with Development, Test, and Production stages. A semantic model in Development has three row-level security (RLS) roles defined, each with DAX filter expressions but no members assigned. After deploying to Test, a security administrator manually assigns Azure AD security groups to each role in the Test workspace. The next week you deploy an updated model from Development to Test again. What happens to the RLS role membership assignments in the Test stage after this second deployment?

You maintain a shared 'Regional Sales' report in a Power BI workspace. A colleague is building a separate 'Executive Summary' report connected to the same shared semantic model and wants to add a button that lets users drill through from a category bar in their report to a detail page in your 'Regional Sales' report, passing the selected filter context. You have already created a well-designed detail page in 'Regional Sales'. What must you configure on that detail page so it can act as the destination for the colleague's cross-report drillthrough?

You import a sales table into Power Query. The 'OrderDateKey' column contains integer values in the format YYYYMMDD (for example, 20240315). Your data model requires a proper Date column to establish a relationship with your date dimension. In Power Query, what is the most reliable way to convert this integer column into a Date data type?

Your model has a Sales fact table with a many-to-one relationship to a Product dimension. Business users report that a matrix showing Product Category rows correctly filters Sales measures, but when they place a Sales-based measure into a slicer context, the Product table does not get filtered by selections made on other visuals that use Sales attributes. The relationship is set to single cross-filter direction (Product filters Sales). Management wants Product visuals to also respond when users interact with certain Sales-derived selections, but they are concerned about introducing filter ambiguity elsewhere in the star schema. What is the most appropriate action?

A Power BI model has a Sales fact table and a Product dimension with a Category column. You write a measure to show only sales that exceed the overall average, but when placed in a matrix broken down by Category, the measure incorrectly compares each category to itself rather than to all categories. The current definition is: HighValueSales = IF([Total Sales] > CALCULATE(AVERAGE(Sales[Amount])), [Total Sales]). What is the correct way to compare each category's total against the average across ALL categories?

You are building a Power BI report on a star schema with a Sales fact table and a Product dimension. Business users want a table visual showing each product alongside its sales rank, where the product with the highest Total Sales is ranked 1. The ranking must recalculate dynamically as slicers (such as Region and Year) are applied. Which DAX measure should you create?

You maintain a Power BI model with a fact table named 'Inventory' that records the on-hand quantity for each product at the end of each day, related to a marked Date table. The business wants a measure named 'Month-End Stock' that, when a month is selected in a matrix, shows the on-hand quantity as of the last date in that month that actually has data — not a sum across all days. Which DAX definition produces the correct semi-additive result?