Jeffrey Wang wrote an interesting post about internals of IF statement in MDX script , describing how and when it is rewritten as a IIF statement. The interesting news in his post is also a possible query plan tool for MDX in the future. Probably not  Read more

The book Expert Cube Development with Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services is finally available on Kindle ! I received many requests for that and the last one just a couple of days ago from Greg Low in its useful review . I'm curious to see whether  Read more

A reader of my PowerPivot book highlighted a strange behavior of the relationship between a datetime column and a Calendar table. Long story short: it seems that PowerPivot automatically round the date to the “neareast day”, but instead of simply removing  Read more

My colleague and friend Roberto Brunetti wrote Windows Azure Step by Step Microsoft Press. It is a good introductive book about programming on Windows Azure. He is a well known speaker, author and trainer in Italy and he finally used its great skills  Read more

Microsoft released the SQL Server 2008 R2 Analysis Services Operations Guide , a white paper that describes how operations engineers can test, monitor, capacity plan, and troubleshoot Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services OLAP solutions in SQL Server  Read more

As Chris announced in his blog, some of the sessions from the SQLBits 8 in Brighton are already available (for free!). Yesterday I watched more than half of my BISM Introduction session just to check that no NDA was broken. And, believe it or not, the  Read more

During TechEd 2011, Microsoft announced an important update to its BI roadmap . The reason why this is important is related to the previous announcement, which I discussed in November 2010 by including links to several sources and comments. At PASS Summit  Read more

In the last months I talked mostly about PowerPivot, but Analysis Services is still growing and a very good sign of that is the number of downloads of The Many-to-Many Revolution whitepaper, who has been published almost 5 years ago and recently surpassed  Read more

Next week I will be in Paris and Brussels for two editions of the PowerPivot Workshop . The evening after the first day of the workshop is always a good chance to meet people from local communities and I am happy there will be two community events, too!  Read more

Some weeks after my blog post about Bonavista Dimensions I’ve been able to look at a comprehensive demo of XLCubed , but since then I’ve been too busy to write about that (and in general to blog – I have several topics I will blog about as soon as the  Read more