I recently wrote an article about duplicated names in DAX to highlight a possible case where you can have a measure with the same name of a column. This is not a good idea, mainly because the syntax to reference a measure and a column is identical, and  Read more

Last year I and Alberto Ferrari wrote a new edition of the Analysis Services Tabular book, which official title is Tabular Modeling in SQL Server Analysis Services (2nd Edition) . Some delay in editing and production delayed the printing, but the book  Read more

More than one year ago, I and Alberto Ferrari started to work on DirectQuery, exploring the new implementation appeared in Analysis Services 2016 for the Tabular models, which uses the same engine of Power BI. The previous version of DirectQuery appeared  Read more

I recently wrote an article to described in more details the syntax of the IN operator in DAX , which is available in Power BI and in the CTP of the next release of Analysis Services. Jeffrey Wang wrote a blog post about the IN operator a few months ago,  Read more

One of the latest addition to DAX has been the ability to apply an external filter context to SUMMARIZECOLUMNS, which makes this function a perfect replacement for SUMMARIZE in DAX. In The Definitive Guide to DAX I introduced such a function, but at the  Read more

When you use the time intelligence functions in DAX, it is relatively easy to filter the same dates selection in the previous year by using the SAMEPERIODLASTYEAR or DATEADD functions. However, if you follow the best practices, it is likely that you have  Read more

If you work with Power Pivot, Power BI, or Analysis Services Tabular, you probably already know VertiPaq Analyzer. If you never used it, with the new release 1.7 you have another couple of very good reason to try it. VertiPaq Analyzer is a Power Pivot  Read more

If you think that the end of the year would have been a quiet time because the Power BI team will skip their monthly release (but are we sure?), you might be reassured (or disappointed depending on your perspective) looking at the news I have in this  Read more

The SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT) editor for Tabular models has been improved in the recent updates. For example, the Tabular Model Explorer enables you to quickly jump between the entities of your model organized in a hierarchical way. However, when it  Read more

Microsoft recently released the Service Pack 1 for SQL Server 2016. If you use Analysis Services, installing this update is a no-brainer and you should do that as soon as possible. The reason are all related to memory management. Microsoft officially  Read more