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

Having the need to execute a package on a remote server, I discovered  that DtExec has no option to launch the package remotely (something that everybody apart me already knew…). So… time to write some code. I wrote a WCF Service that executes a  Read more

In the endless search for optimal performance in Bulk loading data, I have written a paper which describes how to reach top performance using the SqlBulkCopy class in .NET, trying to find the best combination of its parameter settings to load heaps, clustered  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