A common best practice is to use CALCULATETABLE instead of FILTER for performance reasons. This article explores the reasons why and explains when FILTER might be better than CALCULATETABLE.  Read more

How do you get the last process date for an SSAS Tabular Database? This article shows the techniques you can use and explains how to interpret the information available.  Read more

Creating a hierarchy in a Power Pivot or Tabular data model is very easy, but you might experience performance issues if the hierarchy is not “natural”. This article explains how to create hierarchies avoiding these problems.  Read more

Values such as inventory and balance account, usually calculated from a snapshot table, require the use of semi-additive measures. In Multidimensional you have specific aggregation types, like LastChild and LastNonEmpty. In PowerPivot and Tabular you use DAX, which is flexible…  Read more

In a Power Pivot or Tabular model with inactive relationships, one can rely on the USERELATIONSHIP function to apply an inactive relationship to a particular DAX expression. Its usage is simple in a measure, but one might consider alternative syntax…  Read more

In the traditional star schema design of a Data Mart, you replace a missing, unknown or wrong date in the fact table with a dummy value in the Date dimension table. In Tabular, handling a Date table requires an existing…  Read more

With DAX you can calculate the sales of the first, second and third year of a new customer without any ETL. In this article you see how to implement this calculation with good performance.  Read more

You can implement the calculation of stock inventory over time in several ways in DAX. The xVelocity technology in Power Pivot and Analysis Services Tabular is so fast that you might considerboth dynamic calculation and snapshot based calculation  Read more

When you create a Tabular model in Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS), you have to define all of the measures that the user will be able to use. All the measures defined in the measure grid of a table…  Read more

Grouping transactions by customers’ age requires a computation made row by row at transaction level. DAX offers an elegant solution using calculated columns, which is described in this article.  Read more