After months of public preview, Microsoft today is releasing the Power BI service to general availability. The preview was really a beta that evolved in these months, and I personally liked the approach that MS developers have now. I did…  Read more

During the writing of The Definitive Guide to DAX I wanted a simple way to analyze the content and distribution of data compressed in the VertiPaq engine, used by Analysis Services Tabular, Power Pivot and Power BI models. I always…  Read more

If you use SSAS Tabular, this is a very important news! Microsoft released a very important update for Analysis Services 2012 that provides performance improvements to pivot tables connected to an Analysis Services Tabular model: it is SQL Server 2012…  Read more

If you use Analysis Services Tabular, you should dedicate a good amount of time in hardware selection. Unfortunately, throwing money in expensive hardware configuration could be a very bad idea, resulting in your 1,500$ desktop running faster than your expensive…  Read more

I don’t usually blog about news, unless there is a relevant impact on future directions. Last week we have seen a huge number of announcements for Power BI (Custom Visuals now available to anyone through a gallery online, you can…  Read more

While I am teaching Mastering DAX and Optimizing DAX classes, I am always available to speech at local user group events. This week, I will present an updated version of the “Toolkit for DAX Optimization” in Amsterdam, on Thursday, November…  Read more

This short blog post is a note that could help myself in the future, or anyone who is interested in writing a client tool for Analysis Services. When you establish a session to Analysis Services, you can run both DAX…  Read more

I recently wrote an article about how to Create Static Tables in DAX Using the DATATABLE Function. Such a new DAX feature (the DATATABLE function) will be likely used in the upcoming Analysis Services Tabular 2016, but it is not…  Read more

If you are using Power BI Desktop or Power Pivot in Excel 2016, you should learn when and how you can use GROUPBY instead of SUMMARIZE. The SUMMARIZE function is very powerful and internally very complex, so it’s easy to…  Read more

Microsoft recently released the Analyze in Excel feature, which allows you to connect an Excel pivot table to a data model published on Power BI. I think/hope that Microsoft will enhance this feature to extend its current limits. For example,…  Read more