Alberto Ferrari's Blog
View full profileOn how to ask a technical question, if you really want an answer
How many times did you ask a technical question, to be met with a laconic “it depends”? Or worse, for your question to be totally ignored? This is so typical on Internet forums. I know it is depressing not to… Read more
7 reasons DAX is not easy
DAX is simple, but it is not easy. I cannot remember how many times I read this sentence on social media, attributed to me. For good reason: I have repeated this sentence at almost every classroom course I delivered over… Read more
Using DAX with DateTime values
I was recently reading an interesting question by a user. Given a date/time value and a number of hours, add the number of hours to the date, but considering some constraints related to working hours: The working hours are 09:00-17:00… Read more
Displaying a list of selected months
Today I woke up with an interesting question, about how to show a selection of months in a nice way, detecting contiguous selection. You can easily understand the desired solution from the following figure: I enjoyed writing a quick solution,… Read more
On comparing Power BI with other tools
In the last few years, the Business Intelligence (BI) world has been moving towards self-service BI. As expected, several vendors created tools empowering regular users to gain insights from their data. Among the many, there is Power BI. Nowadays, users… Read more
New Whitepaper from SQLBI: Vertipaq vs ColumnStore
At the end of June 2012, I was in Amsterdam to present some sessions at Teched Europe 2012 and, while preparing the material for the demos (yes, the best demos are the ones I prepare at the last minute), I decided to make a comparison between the two Read more
DAX in Action
I do not normally blog about my activity at conferences, courses and workshop, not because I don’t like these “marketing” topics, but only because I forget to do it. That said, sometimes I do some really exciting activities and, well, I need to share Read more
DAX in Action
I do not normally blog about my activity at conferences, courses and workshop, not because I don’t like these “marketing” topics, but only because I forget to do it. That said, sometimes I do some really exciting activities and, well, I need to share Read more
Clever Hierarchy Handling in DAX
Hierarchy handling in DAX is not very easy, due to the fact that hierarchies, unlike it was in MDX, are not first-class citizens in the DAX world. While hierarchies can be easily defined in the data model, there are no DAX functions that let you access, Read more
Speaking at Lisbon NetPonto UG on 02/13/2012
As you might (or not) know, I travel a lot for work and, when possible, I always try to speak at local user groups. It is fun and I always learn a lot by speaking with other professionals like me. Being in Lisbon next week, I’ll deliver a speech at Microsoft Read more