If you work with MDX, using MDX Studio is a must, but it has not been updated for years. But community is great and Ihor Bobak has been able to apply two fixes: performance counters work with named instance and there is a single version regardless of  Read more

Since 2012 I have seen many companies adopting SQL Server Analysis Services Tabular as the analytical engine for their product or service. I think that this is still a fraction of the companies that might do the same choice. Why? Because… The features  Read more

In one of the Advanced DAX Workshop I taught this year, I had an interesting discussion about how to optimize a SWITCH statement (which could be frequently used checking a slicer, like in the Parameter Table pattern ). Let’s start with the problem. What  Read more

I and Alberto Ferrari started delivering training on Power Pivot in 2010, initially in classrooms and then also online. We also recorded videos for Project Botticelli , where you can find content about Microsoft tools and services for Business Intelligence.  Read more

Alberto Ferrari wrote an interesting article about DIVIDE performance in DAX. This new function has been introduced in SQL Server Analysis Services 2012 SP1, so it is available also in Excel 2013 (which still doesn’t have other features/fixes introduced  Read more

An interesting experience with Office Click-to-Run is that trusting it to install updates the night before a conference where you are a speaker. I’m writing this blog post while Alberto Ferrari is delivering its part of the preconference training day  Read more

Using decimal numbers in Power Pivot and Tabular might produce small rounding differences in certain calculations. This is nothing new when you work with floating point, as many programmer knows. The implementation of RANKX might suffer of a behavior  Read more

During the last months I’ve seen an increasing adoption of Analysis Services Tabular (and I’m writing a longer article about a particular area of adoption which was probably not expected – more on that in a few weeks). This year at PASS Summit 2014 there  Read more

Alberto published the Rolling 12 Months Average in DAX article on SQLBI a few days ago, which includes interesting consideration about how to avoid the pitfall of touching the boundaries of the Date table, which could result in a calculation error. More  Read more

Calculating the number of new and returning customers is a recurring question. I would say this is a “classical” Business Intelligence problem, very common in marketing department. I worked on these problems with many customers, with small and large datasets,  Read more