I recently received a question about the memory required to run a Process Defrag on a Tabular model in Analysis Services. The Process Defrag is useful when you run incremental processing of a table frequently, or when some of the values in the dictionary  Read more

One month ago I wrote about my sessions at PASS Business Analytics Conference 2013, in Chicago, IL on April 10-12, 2013. If you still have not registered, you can save $200 by using the code BAC228BL and you should hurry up, because there is another discount  Read more

There is a new whitepaper from Microsoft, Microsoft BI Authentication and Identity Delegation , which describes all the authentication and delegation scenarios with Microsoft BI technologies: Personal BI Scenarios (Excel) Team BI Scenarios (SharePoint)  Read more

UPDATE Aug 16, 2013 : Excel 2013 stand-alone now includes Power Pivot and Power View! Rob Collie Ken Puls (thanks Bob!) wrote a very interesting post about the PowerPivot for Excel 2013 licensing . Short recap: PowerPivot for Excel 2013 is only available  Read more

I recently published a video session on Project Botticelli web site regarding querying in DAX. You can write DAX queries to extract data from both PowerPivot and SSAS Tabular models. This could be particularly useful in three scenarios: Reports in Reporting  Read more

As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, I and Alberto are starting to travel again, delivering SSAS Tabular Workshop and other free community events around Europe. This is the updated list of our next dates, including community events: Online – SSAS Tabular  Read more

I and Alberto Ferrari will speak at SQLBits XI (Nottingham, UK – May 2-4, 2013) and there are many good reasons to join us there, especially if you are interested to DAX! Here are our sessions: Thursday, 02 May 2013 – Training Day - From 0 to DAX The  Read more

DAX offers a set of Time Intelligence functions that simplify writing DAX expressions such as YTD, YOY and other time-related calculations. However, these functions only works when some assumptions are valid: your periods should be “natural” months and  Read more

UPDATE Aug 16, 2013: Excel 2013 stand-alone now includes Power Pivot (now the name has a space and it is no longer a single word!). This post was originally published on Feb 18, 2013 and is now outdated. If you already have Excel 2013 stand-alone, you  Read more

A common question I receive is about how to correctly size a server for an Analysis Services Tabular instance. I always answer that an analytical evaluation is partly an empiric process, because there are many variables involved and the simplest approach  Read more