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

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

After many years of helping several companies around the world creating small and large data models using SQL Server Analysis Services Tabular, I’ve seen a common performance issue that is underestimated at design time. The VertiPaq engine in SSAS Tabular  Read more

I and Alberto Ferrari recently completed the writing of The Definitive Guide to DAX , and we spent months to correctly describe the internals of evaluation context in this language. There are many details that make data model working with both DAX and  Read more

During the writing of The Definitive Guide to DAX I wanted a simple way to analyze the content and distribution of data compressed in the VertiPaq engine, used by Analysis Services Tabular, Power Pivot and Power BI models. I always relied on BISM Memory  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

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

In the last months I assisted many companies implementing solutions based on Analysis Services Tabular. There is not so much difference between the versions 2012 and 2014, because SQL Server 2014 didn’t introduce new features to the BI services. Thus,  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

In the last few weeks I and Teo Lachev took the ownership of DAX Editor code. It is an add-in for Visual Studio that allows you to edit DAX measures in a text editor instead of using the Measure grid. It also provides other features (such as editing measures  Read more