Next week I will finally start the roadshow of the SSAS Tabular Workshop , a 2-day seminar about the new BISM Tabular model for Analysis Services that has been introduced in SQL Server 2012. During these roadshows, we always try to arrange some speeches  Read more

If you have a Slowly Changing Dimension (SCD) Type 2 for your customer and you want to calculate the number of distinct customers that bought a product, you cannot use the simple formula: Customers := DISTINCTCOUNT( FactTable[Customer Id] ) ) because  Read more

I, Alberto and Chris spent many months (many nights, holidays and also working days of the last months) writing the book we would have liked to read when we started working with Analysis Services Tabular. A book that explains how to use Tabular, how to  Read more

  In January I published an article about how to optimize high cardinality columns in VertiPaq . In the meantime, VertiPaq has been rebranded to xVelocity: the official name is now “xVelocity in-memory analytics engine (VertiPaq)” but using xVelocity  Read more

One week ago Microsoft SQL Server 2012 finally debuted with a virtual launch event and you can find many intro sessions there (20 minutes each). There is a lot of new content available if you want to learn more about SQL 2012 and in this blog post I’d  Read more

A few months ago I gave a speech at SQLBits 9 comparing Vertipaq vs. OLAP (you can watch session recording here ), which I repeated a few times in other conferences and webcasts. The title was intentionally provocative but it contained an explanation  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 probably not so useful for a Tabular model considering  Read more

I recently wrote an article about how to implement a Process Add on a table in a Tabular model . This is an area where there is a lack of documentation by Microsoft, especially if you want to use a custom binding query for every Process Add command, which  Read more

We are going very close to the release of SQL Server 2012 and after using Analysis Services 2012 for almost one year in a relatively small number of scenarios, I’m really curios to see the questions and the issues that will emerge when its adoption will  Read more

When you create a PowerPivot workbook or a BISM Tabular model (new in Analysis Services 2012), you store data by using the VertiPaq engine, which is an in-memory columnar database. Instead of considering the row of a table as the main unit of storage,  Read more