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

Last week, a new version of DAX Studio (2.5.0) has been released. You can find a summary of the new features in the blog post from Darren Gosbell – thanks Darren for your wonderful job with this tool! My small contribution to this tool is mainly in the  Read more

The summer is almost over and while we are working on new content (books and other for www.sqlbi.com ), I already have the plans for this Autumn’s conferences. Microsoft Ignite 2016 – September 26-30, Atlanta, GA See what’s new in SQL Server Analysis  Read more

If you already installed Analysis Services 2016, you should change the MemoryHeapType setting. There is a new default value (-1), which is an automatic choice that currently applies a new hybrid allocator (which has the number 5 as a value). It should  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

With the release of Microsoft SQL Server 2016 , there are several options to use Analysis Services Tabular. SQL Server Standard : it includes Analysis Services Tabular, and it is available in two licensing models: Server + Client Access License (CAL)  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

If you are using Power BI Desktop or Power Pivot in Excel 2016, you should learn when and how you can use GROUPBY instead of SUMMARIZE. The SUMMARIZE function is very powerful and internally very complex, so it’s easy to find scenarios where you get unexpected  Read more