The CALCULATE function in DAX is the magic key for many calculations we can do in DAX. However, it is not pretty intuitive how it works and I spent a lot of time trying to understand how it can be…  Read more

Having read this question on the mdsn blogs, I investigated on the KEEPFILTERS function and, after having learned it, it is now time to write about it. Moreover, before start to write about it, I need to thank the dev…  Read more

I recently wrote an article on SQLBI about the semi-additive measures in DAX. I included the formulas common calculations and there is an interesting point that worth a longer digression: the difference between LASTDATE and MAX (which is similar to…  Read more

Does PowerPivot handle Parent/Child hierarchies? The common answer is “no”, since it does not handle them natively. During last PowerPivot course in London, I have been asked the same question once more and had an interesting discussion about this severe…  Read more

If you have already read this post from Marco Russo and have understood everything, then this new post of mine will be useless. But if you are like me, i.e. you have read it and have broken your head trying…  Read more

Surfing on the web, here, I came into this intriguing question: How do we ask something like “Show me how many customers have an iPad but don’t have a book?” We are speaking about a sales analysis where the canonical…  Read more

A few days ago I published the article FILTER vs CALCULATETABLE: optimization using cardinality estimation, where I try to explain why the sentence “CALCULATETABLE is better than FILTER” is not always true. In reality, CALCULATETABLE internally might use FILTER for…  Read more

In my last post about Parent/Child hierarchies, there is a question, in the comments, that I found interesting. Nevertheless, the formula is a complex one and cannot be written in a simple comment. Thus, I am making a follow-up to…  Read more

UPDATE: This blog post is still good for learning DAX principles, but a better description of many-to-many patterns is available on The Many-to-Many Revolution whitepaper that is available here: http://www.sqlbi.com/articles/many2many/ – please download it and use the pattern described there to…  Read more

One of my readers came to me with an interesting formula to compute in PowerPivot. Even if I don’t normally post about very specific scenarios, I think this time it is interesting to write a blog post since the formula…  Read more