March 2011 - Posts

• SQL Pass meeting in Zurich after #powerpivot workshop #ppws

  These are the last days to register for the PowerPivot Workshop in Zurich on April 4-5, 2011. If you are willing to attend, hurry up! Moreover, on Thursday evening there will be also a Swiss PASS Chapter meeting in Zurich and Alberto Ferrari will present Read More... Posted Wednesday, March 30, 2011 8:44 AM by Marco Russo (SQLBI) | 1 Comments Filed under: PowerPivot, PASS, BISM

• More on importing Measures from SSAS cube in #PowerPivot

  Several months ago I wrote about the issue importing measures from an Analysis Services cube in PowerPivot. The short story is that, when you define the MDX query, all columns are imported as Text. Of course, this is not a good thing for the numeric measures. Read More... Posted Monday, March 28, 2011 1:41 PM by Marco Russo (SQLBI) | 2 Comments Filed under: Analysis Services, PowerPivot

• The Last Ever Non Empty calculation in MDX

  Chris Webb posted a wonderful solution to the Last “ever” non empty calculation in MDX . I never thought to this solution and it is really a nice approach. I think that DAX might be faster in this scenario – a similar calculation has been shown in this Read More... Posted Monday, March 28, 2011 12:48 AM by Marco Russo (SQLBI) | 0 Comments Filed under: MDX, DAX

• Import briefing book from ProClarity

  A common feature request for PerformancePoint is importing a briefing book from ProClarity. As far as I know, this is not available. Today (thanks to a tweet from @denglishbi ) I discovered a product, Pyramid Analytics bioXL , which has a specific feature Read More... Posted Sunday, March 27, 2011 11:59 PM by Marco Russo (SQLBI) | 1 Comments Filed under: Analysis Services

• Introduction to MDX in London with Chris Webb

  Most of the readers of this blog probably have a good knowledge about MDX. But if you are new to MDX or want to improve a basic knowledge, and you’re in London or you are looking for a very good reason to visit the city, then you cannot miss the public Read More... Posted Tuesday, March 22, 2011 11:56 AM by Marco Russo (SQLBI) | 0 Comments Filed under: Analysis Services, MDX

• Thinking in DAX (#powerpivot and #bism)

  Last week Alberto published an interesting post about Counting Products in the Current Status with PowerPivot . Starting from a question raised from a reader, Alberto described how to solve a common issue (let me know the “current status” of each item Read More... Posted Thursday, March 17, 2011 6:46 PM by Marco Russo (SQLBI) | 0 Comments Filed under: PowerPivot, DAX

• User Group meeting in Copenhagen for #powerpivot

  The next Monday, March 21st, I will join a special event organized by the Danish SQL Server User Group , Excelbi.dk and the Swedish SQL Server User Group . The meeting will start at 18:00 at the Radisson Royal Blu in Copenhagen, and this is the topic Read More... Posted Tuesday, March 15, 2011 12:21 AM by Marco Russo (SQLBI) | 2 Comments Filed under: Communities, PowerPivot

• Last day of early bird for PowerPivot Workshop in Dublin #ppws

  The early bird discount for the PowerPivot Workshop in Dublin will expire today, Friday 11 March. There is also an upcoming workshop in Copenhagen (March 21-22, 2011) and a PowerPivot workshop in Zurich on April 4-5, 2011. I and Alberto are preparing Read More... Posted Friday, March 11, 2011 1:14 AM by Marco Russo (SQLBI) | 0 Comments Filed under: PowerPivot, DAX

• Difference between DISTINCT and VALUES in DAX

  I recently got a question about differences between DISTINCT and VALUES in DAX and thanks to Jeffrey Wang I created a simple example to describe the difference. Consider the two tables below: Fact and Dim tables, having a single column with the same name Read More... Posted Tuesday, March 08, 2011 2:39 AM by Marco Russo (SQLBI) | 9 Comments Filed under: PivotTable, PowerPivot, DAX

• Parent-child hierarchies and unary operators in PowerPivot

  Alberto wrote an excellent post describing how to implement the Unary Operator feature (which is present in Analysis Services) in PowerPivot (there was a previous post about parent-child hierarchies, too). I have to say that the solution is not so easy Read More... Posted Friday, March 04, 2011 11:24 AM by Marco Russo (SQLBI) | 0 Comments Filed under: PowerPivot, DAX

• Approaching events #mstc11 #ppws #sqlbits

  The spring season is always full of events and I’m just preparing for a number of them. First of all, we are getting very good interest for the PowerPivot Workshop in Copenhagen on 21-22 March 2011. Tomorrow (Friday March 4) will be the last day to take Read More... Posted Thursday, March 03, 2011 12:15 PM by Marco Russo (SQLBI) | 0 Comments Filed under: Conference Communities, Conference, SQL Server, PowerPivot