In DAX string comparison requires you more attention than in SQL, for several reasons: DAX doesn’t offer the same set of features you have in SQL, a few text comparison functions in DAX are only case-sensitive and others only case-insensitive,…  Read more

Using DAX as a query language you will lack a fundamental feature like projection. In fact, DAX allows you add columns to an existing table, but you cannot simply remove some column from a table. In order to do that,…  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

We presented a few session at SQLBits and the video of these sessions are available. This is the list of sessions available from SQLBits 8 and SQLBits 9 – just click the link on the title and jump to the…  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

A BISM Tabular model can be queried by using both MDX and DAX. These two different languages rely on different modeling concepts, because MDX has a semantic based on dimensions, attributes, hierarchies and measures, whereas DAX only knows table and…  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