DAX is the new language used by PowerPivot and Analysis Services in Tabular mode and it resembles the syntax of Excel formula and it can be considered a functional language. You do not have iterative statements, but you can run…  Read more

Hierarchy handling in DAX is not very easy, due to the fact that hierarchies, unlike it was in MDX, are not first-class citizens in the DAX world. While hierarchies can be easily defined in the data model, there are no…  Read more

In Analysis Services 2012 you can process a table in a Tabular model by several ways: you can process the whole table, you can split the table in several partitions and process a single partition, you can merge partitions and…  Read more

Memory settings in Analysis Services might be an important tuning of a correct setup, both for production and developer machines. Analysis Services 2012 can be installed in different ways and the new Tabular instance has new memory settings that are…  Read more

VertiPaq is the internal column-based database engine used by PowerPivot and BISM Tabular models. High cardinality columns might be the more expensive parts of a table. If you cannot remove a high cardinality column from a table, by using the…  Read more

PowerPivot and BISM Tabular handle relationships between tables by using a single column that requires to be a unique column in the lookup table. In this article you will see how to handle relationships between tables that have different granularities,…  Read more

If you want to execute a DAX query from your code to a Tabular model, you might think that an OLE DB connection should be the right way to get your data. It works, but if you your code is…  Read more

When you design a data model for Tabular you should pay attention to a though topic, which is that of circular dependencies in formulas. It is very important to learn how to handle circular dependencies now because in SQL 2012…  Read more

In DAX string comparison requires you more attention than in SQL, for several reasons: DAX doesn’t offer the same set of features you have in SQL, a few text comparison functions in DAX are only case-sensitive and others only case-insensitive,…  Read more

Calculating a ratio in DAX is relatively simple in case the underlying data model is a star schema, but you have to consider additional complexities whenever you have a more normalized model, even just a snowflake schema. In this article,…  Read more