Using TREATAS in place of IN in DAX

During a conversation at PASS Summit, one of the developers of Power BI showed a way to use TREATAS in place of IN in DAX. This post examines pros and cons of using this technique. Read more »

First courses in 2018

The first public courses in 2018 will be Amsterdam and London.
There will be other dates in Europe and US between March and July. We will also deliver courses in Australia in July and August 2018. Watch out updated dates in the next newsletters.

If you want to follow a course before the end of the year, don't miss these:

Seattle • Dec 4-5 - SSAS Tabular • Dec 6-8 - Mastering DAX

ArcGIS Maps, SqlBits precons, Azure Automation, and more...

	• Marco Russo interviewed at Adam and Patrick Unplugged Adam Saxton and Patrick LeBlank interviewed Marco Russo at the end of PASS Summit 2017. If you want to have fun for 15 minutes discussing about DAX and Power BI, watch the interview section of Adam and Patrick Unplugged. Watch now »
	• Esri Plus Subscription for ArcGIS Maps for Power BI Power BI introduced an Esri Plus subscription to provide more maps and data (such as demographics) to use in their free ArcGIS visual available in Power BI. We hope this is a first step in the direction of a true marketplace for custom visuals, which would enable new investments on that platform by many other vendors interested in custom visuals development. Read more »
	• SqlBits 2018 precon: Data Modeling with Power BI For the first time in Europe, on February 21st Alberto Ferrari will deliver at SqlBits 2018 the same preconference already delivered at Microsoft Data Insight 2017 and at PASS Summit 2017 conferences. The goal is introducing the basic techniques of shaping data models in Power BI. Read more »
	• SqlBits 2018 precon: Improve performance with DAX & Power BI The second preconference presented by SQLBI at SqlBits is on February 22nd. Marco Russo will describe how to improve performance of Power BI reports by using tools such as DAX Studio and VertiPaq Analyzer, and by analyzing the most common patterns that could have performance issues – with possible workarounds to solve them. Read more »
	• Processing Azure Analysis Services Using Azure Automation Mark Vaillancourt describes a solution for automating the processing operation in Azure Analysis Services by using Azure Automation. His blog post also includes some explanation of Azure Automation, which is very useful to the many users who are not used to other Azure services. Read more »
	• Performance Monitor for SSAS using Power BI Shabnam Watson presented at PASS Summit a performance monitor solution for Analysis Services based on Power BI. A blog post recaps all the steps and links to the GitHub repository with all the demos. It uses an approach similar to SSAS Events Analyzer, but with a broader scope covering also all the performance counters for SSAS Multidimensional and Tabular. Read more »
	• Open source management tools for SQL Server SQL Operations Studio is the open source management tool for SQL Server provided by Microsoft. This is a great news. When there will be a similar initiative for the Microsoft BI world? We strongly support tools like DAX Studio and Tabular Editor, but an official involvement of Microsoft in these projects would boost the release of new features. Read more »
	• New GitHub location for AdventureWorks The universal standard database for most of Microsoft demos is now available on GitHub. Its previous version was on CodePlex, which is going to be retired before the end of the year. The new repository supports all the versions of SQL Server since 2012. Read more »

Best Practices Using SUMMARIZE and ADDCOLUMNS

Everyone using DAX is probably used to SQL query language. Because of the similarities between the Tabular data modeling and the relational data modeling, there is the expectation that you can perform the same operations as those allowed in SQL. However, in its current implementation DAX does not permit all the operations that you can perform in SQL. Read more »