DAX is the new language used by PowerPivot and Analysis Services in Tabular mode and it resembles the syntax of Excel formula and it can be considered a functional language. You do not have iterative statements, but you can run…  Read more

We finally have the registration website for the community event about Tabular in Analysis Services in Amsterdam on April 16 evening that I introduced in my previous post – don’t miss it, the registration are open (and limited!) at: http://passnl-april2012.eventbrite.com/  Read more

Next week I will finally start the roadshow of the SSAS Tabular Workshop , a 2-day seminar about the new BISM Tabular model for Analysis Services that has been introduced in SQL Server 2012. During these roadshows, we always try to arrange some speeches  Read more

If you have a Slowly Changing Dimension (SCD) Type 2 for your customer and you want to calculate the number of distinct customers that bought a product, you cannot use the simple formula: Customers := DISTINCTCOUNT( FactTable[Customer Id] ) ) because  Read more

Hierarchy handling in DAX is not very easy, due to the fact that hierarchies, unlike it was in MDX, are not first-class citizens in the DAX world. While hierarchies can be easily defined in the data model, there are no…  Read more

I, Alberto and Chris spent many months (many nights, holidays and also working days of the last months) writing the book we would have liked to read when we started working with Analysis Services Tabular. A book that explains how to use Tabular, how to  Read more

  In January I published an article about how to optimize high cardinality columns in VertiPaq . In the meantime, VertiPaq has been rebranded to xVelocity: the official name is now “xVelocity in-memory analytics engine (VertiPaq)” but using xVelocity  Read more

One week ago Microsoft SQL Server 2012 finally debuted with a virtual launch event and you can find many intro sessions there (20 minutes each). There is a lot of new content available if you want to learn more about SQL 2012 and in this blog post I’d  Read more

A few months ago I gave a speech at SQLBits 9 comparing Vertipaq vs. OLAP (you can watch session recording here ), which I repeated a few times in other conferences and webcasts. The title was intentionally provocative but it contained an explanation  Read more

Thanks to Greg Galloway that pointed me out this is possible, in this post I want to show how to create a measure local to a session. This could be done in SQL Server Management Studio, even if it is probably not so useful for a Tabular model considering  Read more