I and Alberto Ferrari will moderate the following Birds of a Feather session at TechEd North America 2013 : CODE: BOF-ITP21 TITLE: How Far Can You Push Tabular? SPEAKER: A. Ferrari; M. Russo TIMESLOT: June 5, 2013 at 1:30 pm ROOM: 263 Abstract: Tabular  Read more

In June I and Alberto will deliver a pre-conference seminar at both TechEd North America (New Orleans, LA) and TechEd Europe (Madrid, Spain). This day is a very good quickstart for those of you that still didn’t complete one of our books , or those of  Read more

I published an article describing how to implement the grouping of sales transactions by age of customer at the moment of the transaction by using PowerPivot or Analysis Services. The same pattern can be used also for any kind of banding operation, this  Read more

I’m so happy that DAX Studio finally supports Excel 2013! As Darren Gosbell described in his blog , this release has a few internal changes that will better support future enhancements. I will port the code to capture the query plan for a query in this  Read more

Microsoft released the Workbook Size Optimizer for Excel , the first version of an Excel add-in for Excel 2013 that inspects the data model and suggest possible optimizations. Fundamentally, it tries to apply the best practices descripted in a white paper  Read more

One year after the release of SQL Server 2012 I see the growing demand for DAX. There are two reasons for that: an higher number of PowerPivot users started to build more complex data models, and SSAS Tabular is starting to be adopted by a larger number  Read more

During a PowerPivot Workshop course we received an interesting question from a student: “Can I use LASTNONBLANK (and FIRSTNONBLANK) with a column which is not a date column?” The reason is that we introduce LASTNONBLANK in the Advanced Time Intelligence  Read more

On April 23 I will present DAX in Action in London and Cardiff at SQLLunch event. How is it possible I will be in two places at the same time? This will be a remote presentation delivered in two locations, where you can have lunch while watching the session.  Read more

The PASS Business Analytics Conference starts today in Chicago. In the next two days, there will be two keynotes . The most famous Steven Levitt, author of Freakonomics, will be on stage on Friday, and tomorrow (Thursday) we will see Kamal Hathi and Amir  Read more

Microsoft published an interesting article about how to optimize memory consumption of a PowerPivot Data Model in Excel 2013 . All these suggestions are also valid for SSAS Tabular. I also wrote an article Checklist for Memory Optimizations in PowerPivot  Read more