In DAX you don’t have the LIKE operator and you have to use SEARCH instead. However, performance are not very good and it is better to use LEFT and RIGHT if you just need to compare the initial (or ending) match of a string. I just wrote an article about  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 table, instead of writing this in SQL: SELECT  Read more

You should have already read that DAX is simpler than MDX. It’s true, and sometime you have to pay a price for simplicity. I am used to say that DAX is somewhere between SQL and MDX. In fact, SQL requires you to put any relationship in the query (using  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. Last week we also submitted  Read more

The SQL Server Profiler provides you many information regarding the internal behavior of DAX queries sent to a BISM Tabular model. Similar to MDX, also in DAX there is a Formula Engine (FE) and a Storage Engine (SE). The SE is usually handled by Vertipaq  Read more

In September 2006 I had announced in this blog the release of the first version of The Many-to-Many Revolution, a whitepaper that describes how to leverage the many-to-many dimension relationships feature that had being available since Analysis Services  Read more

I just published the article Converting MDX to DAX – First Steps on the renewed SQLBI web site about converting MDX to DAX. The reason is that with BISM Tabular in Analysis Services 2012 you will be able to write queries in both DAX and MDX. If you already  Read more

Javier Guillén wrote several blog post about how to implement certain common calculations in PowerPivot. It is interesting to read his posts not only because of the solutions he propose, but also because he uses several techniques that can be applied  Read more

In the PowerPivot book and in the PowerPivot Workshop I mentioned the difference between implicit and explicit measures. The use of implicit measures might be confusing because at the end they are automatically created and maintained by the user interface  Read more

It seems that the next SQLBits will be larger than ever! The SQLBits 9 will take place in Liverpool from 29th September to 1st October 2011. It will be hard to get a nicer weather than in Brighton, but we will try to bring a bit of sun from Italy! I and  Read more