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

You cannot create functions in DAX, and this is a limitation to certain abstractions you might want to implement for complex models. I used a pattern that allows you to "pass an parameter" to a DAX measure, simulating the behavior of a function at least  Read more

Thanks to Darren Gosbell we have DAX Studio 2.2. In this new release: Tracing (query plans and server timings) available for Power Pivot Basic implementation of Intellisense Connect to Multidimensional SSAS servers Support for multiple Power BI Desginer  Read more

The 2015 is a special year for Italy, because the country hosts Expo 2015, which is the current Universal Exposition. For this reason, the Italian PASS chapter promotes a special edition of SQL Saturday, a free training event for SQL Server professionals.  Read more

The last update of Power BI Designer allows you to create measures (not calculated columns yet). Download the new version of Power BI Designer and you will see the New Measure button. The editor is much better than anything you have seen in Excel 2010/2013,  Read more

The last update of Power Query finally supports Analysis Services Multidimensional and Tabular. I waited this version for a very long time, but now it's finally here! Chris Webb already wrote an interesting blog post with several useful link and informations.  Read more