Following the full disclosure of Grant Fritchey and Andy Leonard , here are my evaluations of PASS 2009 Summit evaluations (in both sessions I was on stage together with Alberto Ferrari). To make the post more readable, I anticipate the comments. The  Read more

I know, the title is provocative. It's intentional. I'd like to get feedback about my opinion. My point is simple (but not so short!). PowerPivot (which, you know, I like) and self-service BI are the new buzzwords for BI in Redmond. However, there are  Read more

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 used. First of all, this is the syntax. CALCULATE( <expression>,  Read more

Even if the site still is not updated, the Microsoft BI Conference 2010 will be joined with TechEd 2010 in New Orleans, LA. The conference will start on June 7, 2010, with a pre-conference day on June 6 (there are still no updates about BI Conference  Read more

UPDATE: PowerPivot for Excel 2010 in SQL Server 2012 and Excel 2013 support the DISTINCTCOUNT aggregation in DAX. This blog post is relevant only if you use PowerPivot for Excel 2010 in SQL Server 2008 R2. A PivotTable based on PowerPivot data doesn’t  Read more

I just read what I think is the best analogy for PowerPivot so far – these are the words of Amir Netz in a discussion: A good analogy is the relationship between mainsteam media (newspapers and TV) and internet blogs. In the old days (7 years back...),  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  Read more

In the last few days Alberto wrote two very interesting posts: Remote Execution of SSIS Packages - this is something that many many people asked me since 2005. Now there is the complete code with the solution to this issue. Considering that SSIS 2008  Read more

During a conversation I expressed the idea of making a DSLs to model cubes by leveraging the “Oslo” platform – my needs was having a human readable source file, easy to compare if you have two versions of the same entity (cube, dimension, or something  Read more

I’ve been so busy in the last weeks that I wasn’t able to blog about PASS Summit 2009, so here’s a short recap. I and Alberto presented the SQLBI Methodology in a 75 minutes slot. The room was full, there were about 200 people and no sits available. We  Read more