I and Alberto Ferrari recently completed the writing of The Definitive Guide to DAX , and we spent months to correctly describe the internals of evaluation context in this language. There are many details that make data model working with both DAX and  Read more

During the writing of The Definitive Guide to DAX I wanted a simple way to analyze the content and distribution of data compressed in the VertiPaq engine, used by Analysis Services Tabular, Power Pivot and Power BI models. I always relied on BISM Memory  Read more

After months of public preview, Microsoft today is releasing the Power BI service to general availability. The preview was really a beta that evolved in these months, and I personally liked the approach that MS developers have now. I did not read the  Read more

Microsoft is going to release the new Power BI service on Friday, July 24th. The number of new features is huge, but remember that this is just the beginning of a new wave of continuous updates, similarly to what we have seen for Power Query in the last  Read more

You cannot create functions in DAX, and this is a limitation to certain abstractions you might want to implement for complex models. I used a pattern that allows you to “pass an parameter” to a DAX measure, simulating the behavior of a function at least  Read more

Thanks to Darren Gosbell we have DAX Studio 2.2. In this new release: Tracing (query plans and server timings) available for Power Pivot Basic implementation of Intellisense Connect to Multidimensional SSAS servers Support for multiple Power BI Desginer  Read more

The 2015 is a special year for Italy, because the country hosts Expo 2015, which is the current Universal Exposition. For this reason, the Italian PASS chapter promotes a special edition of SQL Saturday, a free training event for SQL Server professionals.  Read more

In the last months I assisted many companies implementing solutions based on Analysis Services Tabular. There is not so much difference between the versions 2012 and 2014, because SQL Server 2014 didn’t introduce new features to the BI services. Thus,  Read more

The last update of Power BI Designer allows you to create measures (not calculated columns yet). Download the new version of Power BI Designer and you will see the New Measure button. The editor is much better than anything you have seen in Excel 2010/2013,  Read more

In the last few weeks I and Teo Lachev took the ownership of DAX Editor code. It is an add-in for Visual Studio that allows you to edit DAX measures in a text editor instead of using the Measure grid. It also provides other features (such as editing measures  Read more