This morning the PASS Summit 2014 started in Seattle and during the keynote there was several announcements from Microsoft. I’m considering here only the ones about Business Intelligence (you will find other blogs around about SQL Server). In the coming  Read more

Today at TechEd Europe 2014 Miguel Llopis made the first public show of Power Query support for Analysis Services. This is still not available, but it should be released soon (hopefully it will be our Christmas gift!). Here is a list of features shown:  Read more

Alberto Ferrari wrote an interesting article about a strange behavior of AutoExist in normalized data models . I always say that a star schema is the best practice in Power Pivot and Tabular data modeling. The issue described by Alberto is another good  Read more

I recently delivered the online session Create your first SSAS Tabular Model at 24HOP Pass Summit, which recording is now available here . I received many questions and did not have enough time, so I answer now in this blog post. How do you prevent a  Read more

The adoption of DAX is slowly growing and we can see that from comments to article, blog posts, web site traffic (including DAX Formatter usage). For this reason, the demand for more advanced training about DAX is also increasing. We had great feedback  Read more

I recently wrote a short article about filtering data in DAX. In the last month I’ve seen a growing number of people with a SQL background going to Tabular, without having a previous experience of MDX. In my opinion, learning DAX is easier if you try  Read more

If you work with MDX, using MDX Studio is a must, but it has not been updated for years. But community is great and Ihor Bobak has been able to apply two fixes: performance counters work with named instance and there is a single version regardless of  Read more

Since 2012 I have seen many companies adopting SQL Server Analysis Services Tabular as the analytical engine for their product or service. I think that this is still a fraction of the companies that might do the same choice. Why? Because… The features  Read more

In one of the Advanced DAX Workshop I taught this year, I had an interesting discussion about how to optimize a SWITCH statement (which could be frequently used checking a slicer, like in the Parameter Table pattern ). Let’s start with the problem. What  Read more

Alberto Ferrari wrote an interesting article about DIVIDE performance in DAX. This new function has been introduced in SQL Server Analysis Services 2012 SP1, so it is available also in Excel 2013 (which still doesn’t have other features/fixes introduced  Read more