Most of my database model are written with Visio. I don’t want to start a digression whether Visio is good or not to build a simple data model: Visio is enogh for my modeling needs and customers love its colours and the ability to open the model with  Read more

If you use PowerPivot and write some DAX formula, don't miss this post on PowerPivotPro blog - if you want to get an external editor for your DAX formula, you can use Notepad++ for free - and adding the customization described in this post by Colin Banfield,  Read more

When you use CALCULATE in DAX you are creating a new filter context for the calculation, based on the existing one. There are a few functions that are used to clear or preserve a column filter. These functions are: ALL – it can be used with one or more  Read more

I know, the answer is: SharePoint. But, despite SharePoint 2010 is much easier to install (well, I’m not talking about the Beta release here). I recently blogged about the lack of a killer application for the client side. I’ve got many many interesting  Read more

A little background: in these days I’m preparing sessions for some upcoming conferences in Italy (despite the English titles, most of the sessions will be in Italian: Microsoft SharePoint & Office Conference 2010 next week and Microsoft SQL Server  Read more

This post is just a commercial – but, you know, when you write a book, there is no conflict of interests in promoting it! If you still don’t have our Expert Cube Development with Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services book, you can get 25% off the  Read more

You know, selecting calculated members in Excel is not an option. I talked about this issue more than three years ago for the first time: http://sqlblog.com/blogs/marco_russo/archive/2007/01/31/excel-2007-pivottable-with-calculated-members.aspx http://sqlblog.com/blogs/marco_russo/archive/2007/03/07/ssas-2005-sp2-breaks-excel-calculated-member-selection.aspx  Read more

UPDATE 2017-07-12: please note this article was written in 2010, there are now better ways to obtain the same result. Please read these articles: Physical and Virtual Relationships in DAX and Propagate filters using TREATAS in DAX PowerPivot supports  Read more

A calculated column is a DAX expression which is evaluated when the PowerPivot workbook is updated. It is very useful, but there are cases where you want to delay calculation at query time. For example: You want to make part of the calculation depending  Read more

I recently talked about memory usage in PowerPivot and previously I wrote about difference modeling options using table normalization or not . Thus, I wondered whether table normalization is a good practice for performance and memory or not. The short  Read more