Jeffrey Wang wrote a new post about DAX Time Intelligence functions. This is an “under the cover” description that explains the rationale behind these functions, which need to be used following particular guidelines (described at the beginning of the post…  Read more

The video of the session Vertipaq vs OLAP: Change Your Data Modeling Approach that I delivered at SQLBits 9 is finally available! You can find here the video of sessions I and Alberto Ferrari delivered at the last two SQLBits.…  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 wrote a short article about query projection in DAX. To make the story short, you should always use SUMMARIZE in order to remove columns from a table in a query. Thus, if you just want three columns from a…  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

We are still in the early days of DAX and even if I have been using it since 2 years ago, there is still a lot to learn on that. One of the topics that historically interests me (and many…  Read more

Many people are looking for books about Analysis Services Tabular. Today there are two books available and they complement each other: Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Analysis Services: The BISM Tabular Model by Marco Russo, Alberto Ferrari and Chris Webb Applied…  Read more

Kasper de Jonge wrote a blog post last year introducing an interesting new feature in Excel 2013: you can write a DAX query that extracts data from the PowerPivot model and returns a table in Excel. Such a table can…  Read more

During a PowerPivot Workshop course we received an interesting question from a student: “Can I use LASTNONBLANK (and FIRSTNONBLANK) with a column which is not a date column?” The reason is that we introduce LASTNONBLANK in the Advanced Time Intelligence…  Read more

I published an article describing how to implement the grouping of sales transactions by age of customer at the moment of the transaction by using PowerPivot or Analysis Services. The same pattern can be used also for any kind of…  Read more