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

I started using SQL Search (a free product from RedGate) several weeks ago, while it was still in beta. Now that the product has been released and is freely downloadable, I can say it has being really useful since the first beta. My common need is to  Read more

Denny Lee described how to open a trace file in PowerPivot for Excel . It is something that is very important because the SSAS engine which runs PowerPivot runs inside the Excel process and doesn’t have an external connection (thus, also SQL Profiler  Read more