The recent Time Patterns article published in www.daxpatterns.com contains many DAX formulas that I hope will be useful to anyone is interest in implementing time-related calculations in DAX without relying on the Time Intelligence functions. There are  Read more

The current version of Power Query does not have a user interface to create a Distinct Count calculation in a Group By operation. However, you can do this in “M” with a simple edit of the code generated by the Power Query window. Consider the following  Read more

If you use DISTINCTCOUNT measures in DAX, you know performance are usually great, but you might have also observed that the performance slow down when the resulting number is high (depending on other conditions, it starts decreasing between 1 and 2 million  Read more

DAX includes several statistical functions, such as average, variance, and standard deviation. Other common algorithms require some DAX code and we published an article about common Statistical Patterns on www.daxpatterns.com , including: Average Moving  Read more

In the last two weeks we published two new patterns of www.daxpatterns.com : Static Segmentation Dynamic Segmentation These two patterns offers solutions to the general problem of classifying an item by the value of a measure or of a column in your Power  Read more

I will be in Amsterdam for the Advanced DAX Workshop on March 17-19, 2014 (hint: there are still a few seats available if you want to do a last-minute registration), and the evening of March 18 I will speak at a PASS Nederland UG meeting (between 18:30  Read more

A few days ago I published the article FILTER vs CALCULATETABLE: optimization using cardinality estimation , where I try to explain why the sentence “CALCULATETABLE is better than FILTER” is not always true. In reality, CALCULATETABLE internally might  Read more

It is available the new edition of the advanced OLAP book, now called “ Expert Cube Development with SSAS Multidimensional Models ”. The previous edition was titled “Expert Cube Development with Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services” and the biggest  Read more

Apparently you cannot pass an argument to a DAX measure. In reality, you can interact with a slicer that has the only purpose of representing a parameter used by a DAX formula. You just create a table in the Power Pivot or Tabular data model, without  Read more

Many people requested me how to connect to Power Pivot from an external program, without publishing the workbook on SharePoint or on Analysis Services Tabular. I always said it is not possible (for both technical and licensing reasons), but someone observed  Read more