In an Analysis Services cube you can define drillthrough actions on a cube. This feature has been working since SQL 2005 and now it will be available in both BISM Multidimensional and BISM Tabular in the next version of SQL…  Read more

Memory settings in Analysis Services might be an important tuning of a correct setup, both for production and developer machines. Analysis Services 2012 can be installed in different ways and the new Tabular instance has new memory settings that are…  Read more

One week ago Microsoft SQL Server 2012 finally debuted with a virtual launch event and you can find many intro sessions there (20 minutes each). There is a lot of new content available if you want to learn more about…  Read more

A name is important. The right name is important. In this post, I reflect on the choice of names in the Microsoft BI stack. From time to time, a bad name arises. Not a big issue, as together we tend…  Read more

Surfing on the web, here, I came into this intriguing question: How do we ask something like “Show me how many customers have an iPad but don’t have a book?” We are speaking about a sales analysis where the canonical…  Read more

Yesterday I and Alberto delivered the PreCon day about BISM Tabular in Analysis Services 2012. We received very good feedback and now I am looking forward to meet people that read our blogs and our books! Ping me on Twitter…  Read more

When you create a PowerPivot workbook or a BISM Tabular model (new in Analysis Services 2012), you store data by using the VertiPaq engine, which is an in-memory columnar database. Instead of considering the row of a table as the…  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…  Read more

Last week the final session evaluations from PASS Summit 2011 have been communicated to speakers and best scores have been made public. My session was not particularly good: it had very good feedback (overall average 4.32) and some average one,…  Read more

I just published an article about Sorting Dates Columns in PowerPivot v2 and BISM Tabular on SQLBI website. In reality, the article is about sorting columns by other columns in a Tabular model, but the common scenario in which you…  Read more