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• BLANK and Boolean functions like IF in #dax

  A recent change in the DAX language transformed the behavior of IF statement, so that it should not return BLANK but only TRUE/FALSE if the results should be logical expressions. In that case, the BLANK is transformed in a FALSE condition. For example, Read More... Posted Wednesday, September 14, 2016 1:04 PM by Marco Russo (SQLBI) | 3 Comments Filed under: PowerPivot, DAX, Tabular, Power BI

• Leverage INTERSECT to apply relationships in DAX

  If you are used to virtual relationships in DAX (see Handling Different Granularities in DAX ), you probably use the following pattern relatively often: [Filtered Measure ] := CALCULATE (     <target_measure>,     FILTER Read More... Posted Tuesday, July 26, 2016 10:47 AM by Marco Russo (SQLBI) | 1 Comments Filed under: PowerPivot, DAX, Tabular, Power BI, SQL Server 2016

• Free Introducing Power BI eBook and new DAX recorded video course #powerbi #dax

  Microsoft Press released a free eBook you can already download , Introducing Microsoft Power BI , which I and Alberto Ferrari wrote in the last few months. Please note it is a very introductive book, don’t expect an inside-out. As we wrote in the introduction: Read More... Posted Thursday, June 16, 2016 10:00 PM by Marco Russo (SQLBI) | 0 Comments Filed under: DAX, Power BI

• How to fix #dax time intelligence functions in #powerbi when date table uses a surrogate key

  I wrote an article about Time Intelligence in Power BI Desktop to explain how to fix measures using DAX functions for time intelligence when you have a data model where the relationship uses surrogate keys. THe short description is that all the time intelligence Read More... Posted Monday, March 07, 2016 11:16 AM by Marco Russo (SQLBI) | 6 Comments Filed under: DAX, Power BI

• New features in Power Pivot Utils v 1.05: list unused columns #powerpivot #dax

  The latest version of Power Pivot Utils v 1.05 has a new feature that deserves the immediate upgrade: you can list unused columns ! Thanks to Idan Cohen and Amir Hefetz for their contribute to the macros developed by Bertrand d'ARBONNEAU! Read More... Posted Tuesday, February 16, 2016 4:20 PM by Marco Russo (SQLBI) | 3 Comments Filed under: PowerPivot, DAX

• GROUPBY vs SUMMARIZE in #dax #powerbi #powerpivot

  If you are using Power BI Desktop or Power Pivot in Excel 2016, you should learn when and how you can use GROUPBY instead of SUMMARIZE. The SUMMARIZE function is very powerful and internally very complex, so it’s easy to find scenarios where you get unexpected Read More... Posted Monday, February 15, 2016 8:55 AM by Marco Russo (SQLBI) | 0 Comments Filed under: SSAS, PowerPivot, DAX, Tabular, Power BI

• Conferences and Training in Australia Feb/Mar 2016 #dax #sqlsaturday

  In a couple of weeks, I will move to Australia for 3 weeks, visiting Melbourne and Sydney for a number of events and training. This is the list of topics in public events you can attend (with link to registration pages – remember that SQL Saturday conferences Read More... Posted Monday, February 01, 2016 4:09 AM by Marco Russo (SQLBI) | 0 Comments Filed under: Conference, Communities, SSAS, PowerPivot, DAX, Tabular, Power BI

• Power Pivot Utils: a nice collection of VBA macros #powerpivot #dax

  When you use Power Pivot, there are a number of operations requiring more than one click (or much more than just Excel): Creating a pivot table based on the current data model (at least 2 or 3 clicks) Create a table of existing measures (including its Read More... Posted Tuesday, January 19, 2016 1:50 PM by Marco Russo (SQLBI) | 0 Comments Filed under: PowerPivot, DAX, Excel 2013

• Create DAX measures with a session’s scope #dax #ssas #tabular

  This short blog post is a note that could help myself in the future, or anyone who is interested in writing a client tool for Analysis Services. When you establish a session to Analysis Services, you can run both DAX and MDX statements. In DAX, you can Read More... Posted Monday, January 11, 2016 2:35 PM by Marco Russo (SQLBI) | 0 Comments Filed under: DAX, Tabular

• User group session in Amsterdam on Nov 26, 2016: Toolkit for #dax optimization

  While I am teaching Mastering DAX and Optimizing DAX classes, I am always available to speech at local user group events. This week, I will present an updated version of the “Toolkit for DAX Optimization” in Amsterdam, on Thursday, November 26, 2016. Read More... Posted Monday, November 23, 2015 9:20 AM by Marco Russo (SQLBI) | 0 Comments Filed under: Communities, DAX

• Apply AND instead of OR logic to multiple selection in a slicer #dax #powerpivot #powerbi

  I recently write a small article on SQLBI to describe how to create a DAX measure that search for items that have all the items selected in a slicer, instead of any of them. For example, you might want to create a measure that display how many customers Read More... Posted Tuesday, November 17, 2015 9:55 AM by Marco Russo (SQLBI) | 0 Comments Filed under: Excel, PowerPivot, DAX

• Challenge your #dax skills with DAX Puzzle #powerbi #powerpivot

  Last week we launched a new page in SQLBI website: DAX Puzzle (you can also use www.daxpuzzle.com ). The idea is very simple: we describe a scenario, we ask to solve a problem in that scenario and we might provide some hint to help you finding the solution. Read More... Posted Wednesday, October 21, 2015 10:25 AM by Marco Russo (SQLBI) | 2 Comments Filed under: SSAS, PowerPivot, DAX, Tabular, Power BI

• The Definitive Guide to DAX is now available! #dax #powerpivot #powerbi #ssas #tabular

  I am so happy to announce that The Definitive Guide to DAX is finally available! I and Alberto Ferrari spent one year writing this book, and several years collecting the knowledge necessary to do that. The complete title is The Definitive Guide to DAX: Read More... Posted Tuesday, October 20, 2015 9:31 AM by Marco Russo (SQLBI) | 7 Comments Filed under: SSAS, PowerPivot, DAX, Tabular, Power BI

• Fix performance issue of pivot tables with Tabular models

  If you use SSAS Tabular, this is a very important news! Microsoft released a very important update for Analysis Services 2012 that provides performance improvements to pivot tables connected to an Analysis Services Tabular model: it is SQL Server 2012 Read More... Posted Tuesday, September 22, 2015 2:07 PM by Marco Russo (SQLBI) | 0 Comments Filed under: Analysis Services, MDX, DAX, SQL Server 2012, Tabular

• Don’t ignore the Context Transition in #dax

  Almost 3 years ago I wrote an article with the rules for DAX code formatting . If you quickly look at the article, you might think that it is all about readability of the code, and this is fundamentally true. But there two rules that have a particular Read More... Posted Tuesday, September 22, 2015 11:09 AM by Marco Russo (SQLBI) | 0 Comments Filed under: PowerPivot, DAX, Tabular, Power BI