Search results matching tags 'SSAS' and 'PowePivot'

From 0 to DAX at TechEd Pre-Conference Seminar #dax #msteched #tee13

sqlbi — Tue, 07 May 2013 12:54:00 GMT

In June I and Alberto will deliver a pre-conference seminar at both TechEd North America (New Orleans, LA) and TechEd Europe (Madrid, Spain).

This day is a very good quickstart for those of you that still didn't complete one of our books, or those of you that missed one of our workshop about Tabular or PowerPivot. If you are planning to go to TechEd, you might also consider attending a full day about DAX, following the From 0 to DAX one-day seminar. Here are the links:

TechEd North America – From 0 to DAX Pre-Conference Seminar (New Orleans, LA - June 2, 2013)
TechEd Europe – From 0 to DAX Pre-Conference Seminar (Madrid, Spain - June 24, 2013)

And in case you are underestimating the importance of DAX in your future BI projects... read this blog post from Dandy Weyn - his privileged point of view inside Microsoft highlights how much DAX is important today and will be pervasive in the future!

Advanced DAX course in May - unique date in 1H 2013 #dax #tabular #ssas #powerpivot

sqlbi — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 08:55:00 GMT

One year after the release of SQL Server 2012 I see the growing demand for DAX. There are two reasons for that: an higher number of PowerPivot users started to build more complex data models, and SSAS Tabular is starting to be adopted by a larger number of companies, with and without a previous experience on former versions of Analysis Services.

For this reasons we decided to offer a first public edition of our Advanced DAX Workshop, a training on DAX that is aimed at Advanced PowerPivot users and Analysis Services developers that want to master the DAX language. Up to now, we offered this course only for private classes, because of the limited demand, but now there is enough interest and adoption to justify an open class.

The goal of this DAX training is learning to write DAX expressions for measures and calculated columns, DAX queries for reporting needs, read DAX query plans and optimize DAX formulas. The course is a three-day workshop that includes many hands-on lab sessions, with exercises that will guide you in the learning process of the more advanced DAX concepts, enabling you to master the writing of DAX code.

The course will be in London on May 13-15, 2013. There are direct flights with a huge number of countries and cities, also outside of Europe. We do not expect to deliver other editions of this course before other 5-6 months, so don’t lose the chance to attend this intensive DAX master course. I will be the teacher in this edition and Chris Webb will assist me in organization with Technitrain. So don’t wait, early bird discount will expire in a few days, register now and join us in London!

Interviewed in SQL Down Under podcast #sqlserver #ssas #powerpivot

sqlbi — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 18:03:00 GMT

I’ve been interviewed by Greg Low in SQL Down Under show 58, and this is *not* an April fool! We talked for one hour about Tabular, Multidimensional, Data Warehouse and just a little bit about music (you can discover which music genre I’m used to listen…).

You can hear this interview from the SQL Down Under Show 58 page (it is an MP3 format) and if you like it there are many other past shows available. The PodCast is also available on iTunes and you can hear other podcasts in SQL Down Under page on iTunes Preview.

End of 2012 and news in 2013 for #PowerPivot, #ssas #tabular and BI

sqlbi — Thu, 27 Dec 2012 18:26:38 GMT

This year is going to end, Maya failed their predictions and while this is bad for predictive industry, it’s also good for all of us!

We’ve seen many news in Microsoft BI stack:

Excel 2013 has been RTM’d – its General Availability is expected in early 2013 but many early adopters are already using it daily (myself included)
PowerPivot and Power View are both integrated in Excel 2013 and I think that they are the most compelling reason to upgrade your Excel. Power View alone worth the effort
SQL Server 2012 has been released and I’m seeing the first SSAS Tabular projects going in production in these days.
I, Alberto and Chris published the book Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Analysis Services: The BISM Tabular Model, which has good reviews and is selling well. It’s clear that the interest is high in this new technology for Corporate BI
We also run several SSAS Tabular Workshops, many sessions about Tabular topics in conferences and user groups.
I stopped writing blogs/article in the last weeks, but don’t worry, it’s just that I and Alberto are just writing another book…
We recorded several videos about DAX for Project Botticelli and we’ll enhance this library in 2013.

So what’s next in 2013? Let’s see some anticipations and personal predictions:

SharePoint 2013 and Office 365 are going to further innovate Self-Service BI. Maybe that this process is not so fast as Microsoft hopes, but it’s a clear direction and I hope that new features in this area will appear with a sooner release cycle, we simply cannot wait other 3 years to get more features on the cloud.
Mobile BI with Microsoft Technologies is going to be a real thing in 2013. And Office for iPad should be real, too. Power View for iPad as a native application is also another important step.
I will speak at PASS BA Conference 2013 in Chicago, IL (April 10-12, 2013) – at that time, I hope much of the MS Mobile BI tools will be available to anyone.
In March 2013 our new PowerPivot book Microsoft Excel 2013: Building Data Models with PowerPivot will be published by Microsoft Press. We are working hard these days in order to complete the drafts, we listened to all of the feedback we received, especially from Excel users. Time will tell if we did a good job on that.
We will publish other content on SQLBI web site and we have some interesting news for PowerPivot users and Tabular developers… but it’s too early to discuss that. Just stay tuned! Why not registering to our newsletter? (hint – scroll down to the end of the page to insert your email)
We will announce a new PowerPivot Workshop for Excel 2013 (we are working on an updated web site – it should be ready by the end of January)
In January we will announce new dates for our SSAS Tabular Workshop and the new DAX Advanced Workshop.
I hope DAXMD will be released this year, it is already available as CTP. If you create canned reports for SSAS Multidimensional, consider using DAX as a query language when DAXMD will be released.
DAX will be always more important…

Economy is not going well in many countries, and I’ve seen this impacting also our ecosystem. Sometimes you might think that your efforts are worthless, but in the long term the investments in updating skills produces a good return, at both company and individual level. Don’t give up!

I wish you a Great 2013!

A proposal for #DAX Code Formatting #ssas #powerpivot #tabular

sqlbi — Mon, 22 Oct 2012 12:10:00 GMT

I recently published a set of rules for DAX code formatting. The following is an example of what I obtain:

CALCULATE (
    SUMX (
        Orders,
        Orders[Amount]
    ),
    FILTER (
        ALL ( Customers ),
        CALCULATE (
            COUNTROWS ( Sales ),
            ALL ( Calendar[Date] )
        ) > 42 + 8 – 25 * ( 3 - 1 )
            + 2 – 1 + 2 – 1
            + CALCULATE (
                  2 + 2 – 2
                  + 2 - 2
              )
            – CALCULATE ( 4 )
    )
)

The goal is to improve code readability and I look forward to implement a code formatting feature in DAX Studio. The DAX Editor already supports the rules described in the article.

I am also considering whether to add a rule specific for ADDCOLUMNS / SUMMARIZE because I would like to see the “pairs” of arguments to define a column in the same row or with a special indentation rule (DAX expression for a column is indented in the line following the column name).

EVALUATE
CALCULATETABLE (
       CALCULATETABLE (
        SUMMARIZE (
            Audience,
            'Date'[Year],
            Individuals[Gender],
            Individuals[AgeRange],
            "Num of Rows", FORMAT (COUNTROWS (Audience), "#,#"),
            "Weighted Mean Age",
                SUMX (Audience, Audience[Weight] * Audience[Age]) / SUM (Audience[Weight])
        ),
        SUMMARIZE (
            BridgeIndividualsTargets,
            Individuals[ID_Individual]
        ),
        Audience[Weight] > 0
       ),
       Targets[Target] = "Maschi",
    'Date'[Year] = 2010,
    'Date'[MonthName] = "January"
)

I would like to get feedback for that – you can use comments here or comments in original article. Thanks!

A new SQL, a new Analysis Services, a new Workshop! #ssas #sql2012

sqlbi — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 18:03:00 GMT

One week ago Microsoft SQL Server 2012 finally debuted with a virtual launch event and you can find many intro sessions there (20 minutes each). There is a lot of new content available if you want to learn more about SQL 2012 and in this blog post I’d like to provide a few link to sessions, documents, bits and courses that are available now or very soon.

First of all, the release of Analysis Services 2012 has finally released PowerPivot 2012 (many of us called it PowerPivot v2 before this official name) and also the new Data Mining Add-in for Microsoft Office 2010, now available also for Excel 64bit! And, of course, don’t miss the Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Feature Pack, there are a lot of upgrades for both DBAs and developers. I just discovered there is a new LocalDB version of SQL Express that can run in user mode without any setup. Is this the end of SQL CE?

But now, back to Analysis Services: if you want some tutorial on Tabular, the Microsoft Virtual Academy has a whole track dedicated to Analysis Services 2012 but you will probably be interested also in the one about Reporting Services 2012.

If you think that virtual is good but it’s not enough, there are plenty of conferences in the coming months – these are just those where I and Alberto will deliver some SSAS Tabular presentations:

SQLBits X, London, March 29-31, 2012: if you are in London or want a good reason to go, this is the most important SQL Server event in Europe this year, no doubts about it. And not only because of the high number of attendees, but also because there is an impressive number of speakers (excluding me, of course) coming from all over the world. This is an event second only to PASS Summit in Seattle so there are no good reasons to not attend it.
Microsoft SQL Server & Business Intelligence Conference 2012, Milan, March 28-29, 2012: this is an Italian conference so the language might be a barrier, but many of us also speak English and the food is good! Just a few seats still available.
TechEd North America, Orlando, June 11-14, 2012: you know, this is a big event and it contains everything – if you want to spend a whole day learning the SSAS Tabular model with me and Alberto, don’t miss our pre-conference day “Using BISM Tabular in Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services 2012” (be careful, it is on June 10, a nice study-Sunday!).
TechEd Europe, Amsterdam, June 26-29, 2012: the European version of TechEd provides almost the same content and you don’t have to go overseas. We also run the same pre-conference day “Using BISM Tabular in Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services 2012” (in this case, it is on June 25, that’s a regular Monday).

I and Alberto will also speak at some user group meeting around Europe during… well, we’re going to travel a lot in the next months.

In fact, if you want to get a complete training on SSAS Tabular, you should spend two days with us in one of our SSAS Tabular Workshop! We prepared a 2-day seminar, a very intense one, that start from the simple tabular modeling and cover architecture, DAX, query, advanced modeling, security, deployment, optimization, monitoring, relationships with PowerPivot and Multidimensional… Really, there are a lot of stuffs here! We announced the first dates in Europe and also an online edition optimized for America’s time zone:

Apr 16-17, 2012 – Amsterdam, Netherlands
Apr 26-27, 2012 – Copenhagen, Denmark
May 7-8, 2012 – Online for America’s time zone
May 14-15, 2012 – Brussels, Belgium
May 21-22, 2012 – Oslo, Norway
May 24-25, 2012 – Stockholm, Sweden
May 28-29, 2012 – London, United Kingdom
May 31-Jun 1, 2012 – Milan, Italy (Italian language)

Also Chris Webb will join us in this workshop and in every date you can find who is the speaker on the web site.

The course is based on our upcoming book, almost 600 pages (!) about SSAS Tabular, an incredible effort that will be available very soon in a preview (rough cuts from O’Reilly) and will be on the shelf in May. I will provide a link to order it as soon as we have one!

And if you think that this is not enough… you’re right! Do you know what is the only thing you can do to optimize your Tabular model? Optimize your DAX code. Learning DAX is easy, mastering DAX requires some knowledge… and our DAX Advanced Workshop will provide exactly the required content. Public classes will be available later this year, by now we just deliver it on demand.

Vote a bug and a missing feature in #powerpivot #denali #ctp3 on #connect

sqlbi — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 07:24:00 GMT

If you have 30 seconds available, please vote the following items on Connect:

https://connect.microsoft.com/SQLServer/feedback/details/679618/import-attribute-key-from-ssas-in-powerpivot

When you import data coming from an Analysis Services cube in PowerPivot, you cannot import the attribute key value. Only the attribute name is included in the query generated by the query designer. There is a possible workaround, creating a calculated measure with an MDX expression which return the attribute key value corresponding to the current member of the related attribute, but not many users are able to do that.

https://connect.microsoft.com/SQLServer/feedback/details/679677/ragged-hierarchies-cannot-be-imported-in-powerpivot-tabular

When you import data coming from an Analysis Services cube in PowerPivot, you cannot import a ragged hierarchy. I've already described this issue in an older post.

The reason I ask your support is that in Denali CTP3 both PowerPivot and BIDS for Tabular projects has these issues. It really hurts PowerPivot end users, but it is also a waste of time for the experienced BI developer, who need to write a calculated measure in MDX for each attribute key he wants to import it using the query designer (writing MDX by hand is always the preferred alternative, I know) and have to write an MDX query by hand if the levels in the ragged hierarchy are not exposed as browsable attributes (which is not a best practice in cube design!).

Help me to rais the priority for this issues - A multidimensional model in Analysis Services should be a better data source for PowerPivot and BISM Tabular!

#BISM Introduction and #PowerPivot Advanced Data Modeling #sqlbits video available

sqlbi — Sat, 28 May 2011 16:16:52 GMT

As Chris announced in his blog, some of the sessions from the SQLBits 8 in Brighton are already available (for free!).

Yesterday I watched more than half of my BISM Introduction session just to check that no NDA was broken. And, believe it or not, the session had to be really “balanced” in order to not disclose anything of the news announced at TechEd but at the same time I wanted to avoid giving a completely different message. I think that the result is good enough. You just have to replace “BISM Tabular Model” wherever I mentioned “BISM” and with this simple hotfix you can still watch a fresh content!

Also the PowerPivot Advanced Data Modeling session from Alberto Ferrari is available. If you never joined us in a PowerPivot Workshop, take a look at the Alberto’s session. We are just scratching the surface of the innovations in data modeling patterns opened by PowerPivot/Vertipaq usage. We are working on extending these patterns these days and I have to say it is challenging and rewarding to find new solutions to old problems offered by this new tool.

I hope to see other videos available soon, in particular my session about SSAS best practices… I’ll write a new blog post as soon as it is available.