Chris Webb, who wrote the Expert Cube Development with Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services book with me and Alberto, is preparing another Introduction to MDX course in London, this time from October 26th to 28th. It is now a…  Read more

Alberto Ferrari published an interesting blog post regarding how to write particular calculations over a parent-child hierarchy in PowerPivot Denali (and in BISM Tabular, of course). One case is the Sum of Leaves (summing only the leaves of a parent-child…  Read more

I hadn’t time yesterday to write a blog post before of the beginning of the day and I recover now that I’m already back to Europe. I spent many hours at the Microsoft booth meeting people who asked questions about…  Read more

Thanks to Greg Galloway that pointed me out this is possible, in this post I want to show how to create a measure local to a session. This could be done in SQL Server Management Studio, even if it is…  Read more

Next week I and Alberto Ferrari will be in Seattle at PASS Summit 2012. You can meet us at our sessions, at a book signing and hopefully watching some other session during the conference. Here are our appointments: Thursday, November…  Read more

This year is going to end, Maya failed their predictions and while this is bad for predictive industry, it’s also good for all of us! We’ve seen many news in Microsoft BI stack: Excel 2013 has been RTM’d – its…  Read more

Microsoft published an interesting article about how to optimize memory consumption of a PowerPivot Data Model in Excel 2013. All these suggestions are also valid for SSAS Tabular. I also wrote an article Checklist for Memory Optimizations in PowerPivot and Tabular Models…  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

In the last weeks the Microsoft BI buzzword has been Power BI for Office 365, which will be available soon in preview. I read a few comments about the fact that there is a constant discussion about the future but…  Read more

Alberto Ferrari recently recorded a free short video introduction about what is time intelligence. When you have to perform time-related calculations in Power Pivot or in Analysis Services Tabular, you have to rely on some DAX expressions. There are specific…  Read more