Slowly changing dimensions are very common in the data warehouses and, basically, they store many versions of the same entity whenever a change happens in the columns for which history needs to be maintained. For example, the AdventureWorks data warehouse…  Read more

While it is well know that in UDM data should be loaded sorted, to get better file compression and map structures. The world of PowerPivot (and BISM) is yet not explored. Working with a 50 millions rows table, I tested…  Read more

A new date is available for the PowerPivot workshop I and Marco are delivering all over Europe. On September 19-20, 2011 we will be in Lisbon (Portugal) to present the workshop to Excel users and BI professionals. Moreover, as Denali…  Read more

Using Visual Studio to author SSAS Multidimensional projects, I was used to copy the project, deploy it with another name and then proceed with updates, until I was satisfied with the final result. Then, working with the two projects side-by-side…  Read more

This year I and Marco Russo will host a Birds of a Feather lunch about “DAX, Vertipaq and BISM Tabular” during PASS Summit in Seattle. If you want to spend some time speaking about DAX, the new Vertipaq engine of…  Read more

If you think that the end of the year would have been a quiet time because the Power BI team will skip their monthly release (but are we sure?), you might be reassured (or disappointed depending on your perspective) looking…  Read more

A reader of my PowerPivot book highlighted a strange behavior of the relationship between a datetime column and a Calendar table. Long story short: it seems that PowerPivot automatically round the date to the “neareast day”, but instead of simply…  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

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

Yesterday I spent the longest day at this TechEd: we talked with many people at Community Night until 9pm and I have to say that just a few months after Analysis Services 2012 has been released, there are many people…  Read more