February 2010 - Posts

• Discount offer on Expert Cube Development book

  This post is just a commercial – but, you know, when you write a book, there is no conflict of interests in promoting it! If you still don’t have our Expert Cube Development with Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services book, you can get 25% off the Read More... Posted Tuesday, February 23, 2010 4:03 AM by Marco Russo (SQLBI) | 0 Comments Filed under: Analysis Services, Book

• And finally the "by design" issue has been fixed.

  You know, selecting calculated members in Excel is not an option. I talked about this issue more than three years ago for the first time: http://sqlblog.com/blogs/marco_russo/archive/2007/01/31/excel-2007-pivottable-with-calculated-members.aspx http://sqlblog.com/blogs/marco_russo/archive/2007/03/07/ssas-2005-sp2-breaks-excel-calculated-member-selection.aspx Read More... Posted Saturday, February 20, 2010 3:03 AM by Marco Russo (SQLBI) | 0 Comments

• How to relate tables in DAX without using relationships

  PowerPivot supports only one type of relationship between two tables, which is the one-to-many relationship. You can define that a column in a table (the “many” side) corresponds to a lookup table through a column which is an identity column there (the Read More... Posted Tuesday, February 09, 2010 4:44 PM by Marco Russo (SQLBI) | 9 Comments Filed under: DAX, PowerPivot

• Avoiding calculated column in DAX

  A calculated column is a DAX expression which is evaluated when the PowerPivot workbook is updated. It is very useful, but there are cases where you want to delay calculation at query time. For example: You want to make part of the calculation depending Read More... Posted Friday, February 05, 2010 1:27 PM by Marco Russo (SQLBI) | 0 Comments Filed under: DAX, PowerPivot

• Table Denormalization Study in PowerPivot

  I recently talked about memory usage in PowerPivot and previously I wrote about difference modeling options using table normalization or not . Thus, I wondered whether table normalization is a good practice for performance and memory or not. The short Read More... Posted Thursday, February 04, 2010 12:06 PM by Marco Russo (SQLBI) | 0 Comments Filed under: PowerPivot

• SQL Search experience

  I started using SQL Search (a free product from RedGate) several weeks ago, while it was still in beta. Now that the product has been released and is freely downloadable, I can say it has being really useful since the first beta. My common need is to Read More... Posted Wednesday, February 03, 2010 1:53 PM by Marco Russo (SQLBI) | 2 Comments