On January 18th, 2012 at 12pm Eastern Time (which is 5pm GM) Alberto Ferrari will deliver a free online session for the PASS DW/BI Virtual Chapter . This is the official description of the session. Many-to-Many Relationships in DAX The introduction of  Read more

Analysis Services answers to query in MDX, in DAX (by now just for Tabular models) and has a limited capability to answer SQL queries. It is not useful for any development or client tool, but I wanted to write a blog post on it in order to be able to  Read more

A few weeks ago I received a question that inspired me in writing this article about how to handle data at different granularities in PowerPivot and BISM Tabular. I think this is a common pattern when you have a budget table that contains data at an aggregated  Read more

The Microsoft TechEd Europe 2012 will be in Amsterdam this year on June 26-29. The day before (25 June 2012) there are several pre-conference seminars and I’m glad to announce that I and Alberto Ferrari will deliver this one: Using BISM Tabular in Microsoft  Read more

Tomorrow January 10th, 2012 at 3pm Eastern Time (which is 8pm GMT) I will deliver a free online session for the PASS DW/BI Virtual Chapter . This is the official description of the session. Vertipaq vs OLAP: Change Your Data Modeling Approach While in  Read more

The DAX query syntax allows you to insert a parameter by using the @ symbol. EVALUATE CALCULATETABLE ( ‘Product Subcategory’ , ‘Product Category’ [Product Category Name] = @Category ) Depending on the client and on the driver you are using to execute  Read more

Jeffrey Wang started the 2012 (or finished the 2011, depending on your time zone) by publishing the first article dedicated to DAX Query plan . While I look forward to reading next articles, it is interesting the explanation of what is the relationship  Read more

In DAX you don’t have the LIKE operator and you have to use SEARCH instead. However, performance are not very good and it is better to use LEFT and RIGHT if you just need to compare the initial (or ending) match of a string. I just wrote an article about  Read more

I wrote a short article about query projection in DAX. To make the story short, you should always use SUMMARIZE in order to remove columns from a table in a query. Thus, if you just want three columns from a table, instead of writing this in SQL: SELECT  Read more

You should have already read that DAX is simpler than MDX. It’s true, and sometime you have to pay a price for simplicity. I am used to say that DAX is somewhere between SQL and MDX. In fact, SQL requires you to put any relationship in the query (using  Read more