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

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

The project codenamed Gemini has an official name now: PowerPivot . The complete name should be “PowerPivot for Excel 2010”, but PowerPivot is simpler. I didn’t like that name yesterday, but today it seems better. Microsoft announced this name at the  Read more

A few months ago I wrote about a possible bug using both DirectSlice and MeasureExpression . A few days ago, Edward Melomed answered that the behavior we observed was not a bug but by design: you can read the complete answer on Connect . The key point  Read more