The growing adoption of Power BI Desktop is gathering new users of the DAX language. At the same time, there are a few new features, such as bidirectional filter propagation, that introduce new concepts to existing knowledge. For this reason, in the last  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

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

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

After the initial release of DAX Studio 2.0, in December 2014, I started working on a few features to analyze performance of DAX queries. Darren Gosbell implemented many other features, and Daniele Perilli helped us with the graphics of the UI. We certainly  Read more

You are probably used to think to FIRSTNONBLANK and LASTNONBLANK as DAX functions related to time-intelligence calculations (usually for semi-additive measures ). However, these functions have a syntax and a behavior that can be useful in other scenarios.  Read more

In the last two years, I and Alberto Ferrari delivered many courses about Power Pivot, SSAS Tabular, and DAX. We had DAX content in many of the courses, and this created some overlapping and the lack of a clear guidance for studying DAX, regardless of  Read more

I have seen many different types of custom calendars implemented in Power Pivot, Tabular, and DAX. I also wrote several articles ( week based calendars and time patterns ). However, there is a scenario that is hard to manage with the classical approaches,  Read more