Marco Russo's Blog
View full profileTwo weeks, two countries, two conferences, one family
In the last week, I have been speaking at two different events in a few days: SQLBits 2018 in London, UK and SQL Konferenz 2018 in Darmstadt, Germany. These two events created for SQL Server professional are now “polluted” by… Read more
The new Data Modeling for Power BI course
If you import more than one table into Power BI or Power Pivot, you have a data model. When you have more than one table, you usually have relationships between tables. When you analyze data, you often have many choices… Read more
Power Pivot Utilities 1.09
Bertrand d’Arbonneau added a new feature in the last version (v 1.09) of Power Pivot Utilities, which allows the visualization of Dependents and Precedents measures in the measure list created by the List Measures tool. How to use the new… Read more
Why I attend conferences and why I speak at conferences
I’ve recently been asked to talk about my experience as a speaker at technical conferences. I wasn’t sure what to say, until I realized that it makes more sense to start with explaining the reasons why one should attend a… Read more
What has happened in the DAX world in 2017
We are approaching the end of 2017, so it is a good time to review what happened in the DAX world this year, what we’ve been up to at SQLBI and what is going to happen in 2018. New DAX… Read more
Using TREATAS in place of IN in DAX
During a conversation at PASS Summit, one of the developers of Power BI shown me a way to use TREATAS in place of IN in DAX. I am not sure it increases readability of the code, but let’s examine pros… Read more
Strange behavior of HASONEVALUE and SELECTEDVALUE
I recently stumbled across a strange behavior of HASONEVALUE, which also impacts the SELECTEDVALUE function. When the only selected item in a column is a numeric value 0 and the column also contains a blank value, there is a bug… Read more
Latest news from PASS Summit 2017
PASS Summit is the largest conference about the Microsoft Data Platform technology. Started as a Professional Association for SQL Server community, now the PASS brand includes the many technologies included in the Microsoft Data Platform. It is a large and… Read more
Offline model editor experience for Power BI
Professional BI developers using Analysis Services and advanced users working with Power BI share a common pain. Their productivity editing a large data model is much lower than what you might expect in 2017. There are many reasons for that.… Read more
Why data modeling is important in #powerbi
I have a long experience in working on reporting systems based on semantic models. Now we call them “self-service BI”, but the principles are the same we had in DSS (decision support system), OLAP (on-line analytical processing), and many other… Read more