Recently I received a request from a reader related to the handling of missing or invalid dates in Tabular (but the same can be applied to Power Pivot). In the Analysis Services Tabular book, we wrote that you can insert…  Read more

It is available the new edition of the advanced OLAP book, now called “Expert Cube Development with SSAS Multidimensional Models”. The previous edition was titled “Expert Cube Development with Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services” and the biggest issue of…  Read more

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

link In many workshops and sessions about PowerPivot the most frequently asked question has always been: how can I automate the PowerPivot Data Refresh in Excel? I talked about that a few weeks ago. The sad answer is that this…  Read more