I received this request in many courses, messages and also forum discussions: having an Analysis Services Tabular model, it would be nice being able to extract a correspondent PowerPivot data model. In order of priority, here are the specific feature…  Read more

If you think PowerPivot and Tabular are good tools but sometime the design tools are not fast/complete/flexible enough, please consider voting this suggestion on Connect to request a textual representation Tabular or PowerPivot Data Models. This is the simplest way…  Read more

We (I found the issue, Chris created the repro) detected a possible bug using DirectSlice and MeasureExpression.We just posted it here: https://connect.microsoft.com/SQLServer/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=455732 The issue could be very dangerous resulting in wrong query results on cells affected by DirectSlice property and MeasureExpression,…  Read more

Thanks to a comment sent by a reader of my M2M paper, I just found a possible bug (or “not supported by design feature”) of the CREATE LOCAL CUBE mdx statement. In short, it seems that a simple many-to-many dimension…  Read more

This is not the first time I found non-intuitive issues with collation, Unicode and 8-bit strings with SQL Server, but this time I discovered (more precisely: one of my customers discovered and asked me…) a strange behavior that affects the…  Read more

We all like Analysis Services, but when it comes to drillthrough, there are a number of issue that we like to be fixed. I added them in a feedback item on Connect – so please vote it and give to…  Read more

I and Alberto have posted a suggestion on Microsoft Connect to improve aggregation wizard behavior in a future version of SQL Server. The idea is to give an aggregation usage priority to dimension attributes for each cube or measure group.…  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…  Read more

The short answer is yes. The long answer is that Microsoft should still improve in many ways. I thought about this many times before writing this post, because I want to be constructive and I hope that my words will…  Read more

More than 2 years ago I posted on the microsoft olap newsgroup a bug on the QueryLog table that Analysis Services uses to log user queries (very important to make usage based optimization). A KB was supposed to be pending, but…  Read more