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

In its first two months, DAX Formatter served 3,500 requests and I see the daily trend slowly raising. If you have observed carefully the first articles published on DAX Patterns, you might have seen that you can click the link”Code beautified with DAX  Read more

Creating Distinct Count calculations in DAX is pretty easy when the target of the operation is a column in the “fact table” of a star schema. When you want to apply the DISTINCTCOUNT function to a dimension attribute (such as Customer Country, Product  Read more

The first pattern published on www.daxpatterns.com is the Cumulative Total . Another common name of this calculation is Running Total, but the reason why we named the pattern in this way is that we identify all those scenarios in which you want to obtain  Read more

I’m very proud to announce the official launch of the DAX Patterns website! http://www.daxpatterns.com I and Alberto Ferrari worked on this idea for a really long time. Many business scenarios can be solved in Power Pivot using always the same models,  Read more

I wrote an article about how to get the Last Process Date in SSAS Tabular . This is a common request and there are many ways to obtain this information. You can use the metadata provided by XMLA or DMV, just as you can do in SSAS Multidimensional. Or  Read more