I’m not a DBA, but I’ve been impressed about how much intuitive and easy to use is the online demo of SQL Monitor from Red Gate . This is what I would really call a useful Dashboard. It could be a good demo for a CFO too!  Read more

PASS Summit 2010 is approaching and I'm facing the dilemma of choosing concurrent sessions in certain timeslots. I'm not alone in this situation and discussing it with other people only enhance my doubts because I see only more reasons to look also other  Read more

Yesterday Microsoft released the Windows Azure Marketplace DataMarket (which everyone will simply call DataMarket, I hope). It was previously called Codename “Dallas”. This is an important step toward the empowerment of self-service BI tools. Microsoft  Read more

A few days ago Alberto released the version 1.1 of the Visio Forward Engineer add-in for Microsoft Office Visio 2010. I think it should be a standard feature of Visio, but you know, Microsoft priorities are not always aligned with our ones, and the “do-it-yourself”  Read more

Alberto wrote a really fine post that should help you to better understand how many-to-many relationships can work in PowerPivot, using a lot of images that explain some concepts better than a thousand words. The example shown by Alberto is really interesting  Read more

You can download these two sample chapters of the PowerPivot for Excel 2010: Give Your Data Meaning book: Chapter 2 - PowerPivot at Work This is introductive and suggested to read to anyone who is new to PowerPivot Chapter 7 – Date Calculations in DAX  Read more

You know, I love Visio to develop simple databases and I have written a Visio add-in that performs the forward engineer of data models, called Visio Forward Engineer. Now I have found some time to update the project to version 1.1. You can download the  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 to understand the final (really smart!) formula,  Read more

I will be a speaker this year at PASS Summit 2010 in Seattle, and I will present two sessions. The one I’d like to talk about in this post is the Inside DAX one. I chose to do this session (instead of another one that was initially planned) because when  Read more

Alberto Ferrari posted an interesting article that show how you can use a continuous value in a group of values in PowerPivot. I think this is a feature that many users would like to get in a standard Analysis Services cube, but that unfortunately requires  Read more