PowerPivot and Analysis Services 2012 Tabular do not support many-to-many (M2M) relationships directly in the data model. However, you can obtain the desired result from a many-to-many relationship by writing a DAX expression. For example, consider the classic M2M relationship…  Read more

After the first two editions of the SSAS Tabular Workshop , I and Alberto had some time to flush some of the pending activities. We published two articles: Clever Hierarchy Handling in DAX : DAX is not a hierarchy-friendly language, especially if you  Read more

DAX is the new language used by PowerPivot and Analysis Services in Tabular mode and it resembles the syntax of Excel formula and it can be considered a functional language. You do not have iterative statements, but you can run…  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

Hierarchy handling in DAX is not very easy, due to the fact that hierarchies, unlike it was in MDX, are not first-class citizens in the DAX world. While hierarchies can be easily defined in the data model, there are no…  Read more

Analysis Services answers to query in MDX, in DAX (by now just for Tabular models) and has a limited capability to answer SQL queries. It is not useful for any development or client tool, but I wanted to write a blog post on it in order to be able to  Read more

A few weeks ago I received a question that inspired me in writing this article about how to handle data at different granularities in PowerPivot and BISM Tabular. I think this is a common pattern when you have a budget table that contains data at an aggregated  Read more

PowerPivot and BISM Tabular handle relationships between tables by using a single column that requires to be a unique column in the lookup table. In this article you will see how to handle relationships between tables that have different granularities,…  Read more

If you want to execute a DAX query from your code to a Tabular model, you might think that an OLE DB connection should be the right way to get your data. It works, but if you your code is…  Read more

When you design a data model for Tabular you should pay attention to a though topic, which is that of circular dependencies in formulas. It is very important to learn how to handle circular dependencies now because in SQL 2012…  Read more