Aug 17, 2020

Converting MDX to DAX – First Steps

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

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

Year-To-Date and Difference-Over-Previos-Year (or Year-Over-Year Growth) are among the most required features of any user. Some OLAP client (like ProClarity) offers features that try to solve this problem client-side, but I don’t like this approach given that you might have…  Read more

I spent three days in Seattle at Microsoft Data Insight Summit , delivering a preconference day about data modeling for business users, and two workshops about DAX. All of these were sold-out, so even if you attended the conference, you might be interested  Read more

I wrote many articles and white papers about implementing many-to-many relationships in Analysis Services - for both Multidimensional and Tabular models. For the latter, the same techniques are also useful in Power Pivot and Power BI. With the recent  Read more

Two years ago I and Alberto Ferrari spent time discussing techniques to calculate new and returning customers, and we wrote the result of our study in the New and Returning Customer article in DAX Patterns web site and book . During one of the Mastering  Read more

David DeWitt and Rimma Nehme delivered the day 2 keynote at PASS Summit 2015 talking about Internet of Things. Many PASS attendees know David for providing some of the best keynotes every, technical and without vaporware and marketing stuffs. So this  Read more

In the September release of Power BI Desktop, Microsoft introduced a new important feature: calculated tables. Chris Webb wrote a quick introduction to this feature, and Jason Thomas published a longer post about when to use calculated tables . The reason  Read more

Sep 22, 2015

Natural Hierarchies in Power Pivot and Tabular

Creating a hierarchy in a Power Pivot or Tabular data model is very easy, but you might experience performance issues if the hierarchy is not “natural”. This article explains how to create hierarchies avoiding these problems.  Read more

If you use SSAS Tabular, this is a very important news! Microsoft released a very important update for Analysis Services 2012 that provides performance improvements to pivot tables connected to an Analysis Services Tabular model: it is SQL Server 2012  Read more