When you create a PowerPivot workbook or a BISM Tabular model (new in Analysis Services 2012), you store data by using the VertiPaq engine, which is an in-memory columnar database. Instead of considering the row of a table as the main unit of storage,  Read more

On January 18th, 2012 at 12pm Eastern Time (which is 5pm GM) Alberto Ferrari will deliver a free online session for the PASS DW/BI Virtual Chapter . This is the official description of the session. Many-to-Many Relationships in DAX The introduction of  Read more

Analysis Services answers to query in MDX, in DAX (by now just for Tabular models) and has a limited capability to answer SQL queries. It is not useful for any development or client tool, but I wanted to write a blog post on it in order to be able to  Read more

A few weeks ago I received a question that inspired me in writing this article about how to handle data at different granularities in PowerPivot and BISM Tabular. I think this is a common pattern when you have a budget table that contains data at an aggregated  Read more

The Microsoft TechEd Europe 2012 will be in Amsterdam this year on June 26-29. The day before (25 June 2012) there are several pre-conference seminars and I’m glad to announce that I and Alberto Ferrari will deliver this one: Using BISM Tabular in Microsoft  Read more

Tomorrow January 10th, 2012 at 3pm Eastern Time (which is 8pm GMT) I will deliver a free online session for the PASS DW/BI Virtual Chapter . This is the official description of the session. Vertipaq vs OLAP: Change Your Data Modeling Approach While in  Read more

In DAX you don’t have the LIKE operator and you have to use SEARCH instead. However, performance are not very good and it is better to use LEFT and RIGHT if you just need to compare the initial (or ending) match of a string. I just wrote an article about  Read more

I wrote a short article about query projection in DAX. To make the story short, you should always use SUMMARIZE in order to remove columns from a table in a query. Thus, if you just want three columns from a table, instead of writing this in SQL: SELECT  Read more

I just published an article about Sorting Dates Columns in PowerPivot v2 and BISM Tabular on SQLBI website. In reality, the article is about sorting columns by other columns in a Tabular model, but the common scenario in which you need that is in a Calendar  Read more

The SQL Server Profiler provides you many information regarding the internal behavior of DAX queries sent to a BISM Tabular model. Similar to MDX, also in DAX there is a Formula Engine (FE) and a Storage Engine (SE). The SE is usually handled by Vertipaq  Read more