Some time ago, I wrote a post about how to handle Parent/Child hierarchies in PowerPivot 1.0. It was pretty intricate, because P/C are not handled natively in PowerPivot. Now, with the advent of Denali, Microsoft gave us all the functions…  Read more

Microsoft recently released the Service Pack 1 for SQL Server 2016. If you use Analysis Services, installing this update is a no-brainer and you should do that as soon as possible. The reason are all related to memory management. Microsoft…  Read more

If you use Report Builder with Reporting Services, you can use DAX queries even if the editor for Analysis Services provider does not support DAX syntax. In fact, the DMX editor that you can use in Visual Studio editor of…  Read more

Two years ago Microsoft started a certification program called SSAS Maestro, which was intended to be as a step towards a broader certification such as a Microsoft Certified Architect (MCA) or Microsoft Certified Solution Master (MCSM) for Business Intelligence (so…  Read more

I’ve been interviewed by Greg Low in SQL Down Under show 58, and this is *not* an April fool! We talked for one hour about Tabular, Multidimensional, Data Warehouse and just a little bit about music (you can discover which…  Read more

The DATE function in DAX has this simple syntax: DATE( <year>, <month>, <day> ) If you are like me, you never read the BOL notes that says in a clear way that it supports dates beginning with March 1, 1900.…  Read more

After many conferences and travels, this summer I had some time to write and prepare new sessions for the next wave of conferences. In reality I am just doing that, even if I already restarted traveling for consulting and training.…  Read more

In DAX you don’t have the LIKE operator and you have to use SEARCH instead. However, performance are not very good and it is better to use LEFT and RIGHT if you just need to compare the initial (or ending)…  Read more

Last week Microsoft announced a new licensing schema for SQL Server 2012. If you are interested in an extensive discussion of the new licensing scheme, Denny Cherry wrote a great blog post about that. I’d like to comment about the…  Read more

If you are looking to create many-to-many relationships based models in PowerPivot and in BISM Tabular, probably one day you will be interested in using them with Power View (formerly codename “Crescent”). There is a very bad news for you:…  Read more