Search results matching tags 'Tabular' 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.

Querying with DAX video available on Project Botticelli #dax #ssas #powerpivot

sqlbi — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 13:39:00 GMT

I recently published a video session on Project Botticelli web site regarding querying in DAX. You can write DAX queries to extract data from both PowerPivot and SSAS Tabular models. This could be particularly useful in three scenarios:

Reports in Reporting Services
Excel tables (used to populate other PowerPivot data models, for example)
Reports embedded in custom applications (i.e. ASP.NET pages)

Today there is a lack of tools to help you writing a DAX query, probably the best choice is DAX Studio, which I used in the video, but it has to be enhanced and completed. I hope to be able to work on that, but remember that other volunteers are welcome in a Codeplex project!

In this video I cover in particular the syntax of EVALUATE, CALCULATETABLE, SUMMARIZE, ROLLUP, ADDCOLUMNS, and ROW functions. The video is available to Project Botticelli subscribers.

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!

DATE function does not support all the dates in DAX by design #powerpivot #tabular #dax

sqlbi — Mon, 05 Nov 2012 12:52:00 GMT

The DATE function in DAX has this simple syntax:

DATE( <year>, <month>, <day> )

If you are like me, you never read the BOL notes that says in a clear way that it supports dates beginning with March 1, 1900. In fact, I was wrongly assuming that it would have supported any date that can be represented in a Date data type in Data Models, so all the dates beginning with January 1, 1900. The funny thing is that in some of the BOL documentation you will find that Date data type supports dates after March 1, 1900 (which seems not including that date, but this is a detail…). But we should not digress. The real issue is that if you try to call the DATE function passing values between January 1 and February 28, 1900, you will see a different day as a result.

evaluate row ( "x", DATE( 1900, 1, 1 ) )

-- return WRONG result
-- [x] 12/31/1899 12:00:00 AM

evaluate row ( "x", DATE( 1901, 2, 29 ) )

-- return WRONG result
-- [x] 2/28/1900 12:00:00 AM

evaluate row ( "x", DATE( 1900, 3, 1 ) )

-- return CORRECT result
-- [x] 3/1/1900 12:00:00 AM

As usual, this is not a bug. It is “by design”. The DATE function works in this way in Excel. And also in Excel it was “by design”. In this case the design is having the same bug of Lotus 1-2-3 that handled 1900 a leap year, even though it isn’t. The first release of Lotus 1-2-3 is dated 1983. I hope many of my readers are younger than that. I tried to open a bug in Connect. Please vote it. I would like if Microsoft changed this type of items from “by design” (as we can expect) to “by genetic disease”. Or by “historical respect”, in order to be more politically correct.

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!

Optimize SUMMARIZE with ADDCOLUMNS in Dax #ssas #tabular #dax #powerpivot

sqlbi — Tue, 04 Sep 2012 08:23:00 GMT

If you started using DAX as a query language, you might have encountered some performance issues by using SUMMARIZE. The problem is related to the calculation you put in the SUMMARIZE, by adding what are called extension columns, which compute their value within a filter context defined by the rows considered in the group that the SUMMARIZE uses to produce each row in the output.

Most of the time, for simple table expressions used in the first parameter of SUMMARIZE, you can optimize performance by removing the extended columns from the SUMMARIZE and adding them by using an ADDCOLUMNS function. In practice, instead of writing

SUMMARIZE( <table>, <group_by_column>, <column_name>, <expression> )

you can write:

ADDCOLUMNS( SUMMARIZE( <table>, <group by column> ), <column_name>, CALCULATE( <expression> ))

The performance difference might be huge (orders of magnitude) but this optimization might produce a different semantic and in these cases it should not be used. A longer discussion of this topic is included in my Best Practices Using SUMMARIZE and ADDCOLUMNS article on SQLBI, which also include several details about the DAX syntax with extended columns. For example, did you know that you can create an extended column in SUMMARIZE and ADDCOLUMNS with the same name of existing measures? It is *not* a good thing to do, and by reading the article you will discover why. Enjoy DAX!

DAX Studio 1.0 beta available #dax #tabular #powerpivot

sqlbi — Mon, 30 Jul 2012 08:10:00 GMT

Are you waiting for a usable and interactive DAX editor? Are you tired of using the MDX editor provided by SSMS as a temporary solution to write and execute a DAX query? The wait is over!

DAX Studio is a free Excel add-in that enables you to write a DAX query in a small dialog box that offer a productive environment, with a tabular object browser and syntax highlighting. You can drag and drop table and column names from the object browser to the editor, getting a proper DAX syntax for the objects (this is something that is not available in SSMS because you browse multidimensional data and the syntax used for objects is the MDX one). More interesting, you can run a query and project the result either in an Excel worksheet or in an independent table grid.

You can connect to an embedded PowerPivot workbook or to an external Tabular model published on Analysis Services. You can find a longer introduction of DAX Studio in a blog post written by Paul te Braak.

My favorite use of DAX Studio is writing and testing DAX measures. You can easily test them by using the DEFINE MEASURE syntax followed by a sample query that uses the local measure.

Once you are confident that the measure works well, you can copy and paste its definition into your PowerPivot or Tabular project.

This is just a version 1.0 and we look forward to enhance the features in the future. This is a CodePlex project so you can participate as a developer, as a tester or by just providing your feedback about bugs and desired features.

Analysis Services Tabular books #ssas #tabular

sqlbi — Mon, 09 Jul 2012 12:10:00 GMT

Many people are looking for books about Analysis Services Tabular. Today there are two books available and they complement each other:

Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Analysis Services: The BISM Tabular Model by Marco Russo, Alberto Ferrari and Chris Webb
Applied Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Analysis Services: Tabular Modeling by Teo Lachev

The book I wrote with Alberto and Chris is a complete guide to create tabular models and has a good coverage about DAX, including how to use it for enriching a semantic model with calculated columns and measures and how to use it for querying a Tabular model. In my experience, DAX as a query language is a very interesting option for custom analytical applications that requires a fast calculation engine, or simply for standard reports running in Reporting Services and accessing a Tabular model. You can freely preview the table of content and read some excerpts from the book on Safari Books Online. The book is in printing and should be shipped within mid-July, so finally it will be very soon on the shelf of all the people already preordered it!

The Teo Lachev’s book, covers the full spectrum of Tabular models provided by Microsoft: starting with self-service BI, you have users creating a model with PowerPivot for Excel, publishing it to PowerPivot for SharePoint and exploring data by using Power View; then, the PowerPivot for Excel model can be imported in a Tabular model and published in Analysis Services, adding more control on the model through row-level security and partitioning, for example. Teo’s book follows a step-by-step approach describing each feature that is very good for a beginner that is new to PowerPivot and/or to BISM Tabular. If you need to get the big picture and to start using the products that are part of the new Microsoft wave of BI products, the Teo’s book is for you.

After you read the book from Teo, or if you already have a certain confidence with PowerPivot or BISM Tabular and you want to go deeper about internals, best practices, design patterns in just BISM Tabular, then our book is a suggested read: it contains several chapters about DAX, includes discussions about new opportunities in data model design offered by Tabular models, and also provides examples of optimizations you can obtain in DAX and best practices in data modeling and queries.

It might seem strange that an author write a review of a book that might seem to compete with his one, but in reality these two books complement each other and are not alternatives. If you have any doubt, buy both: you will be not disappointed! Moreover, Amazon usually offers you a deal to buy three books, including the Visualizing Data with Microsoft Power View, another good choice for getting all the details about Power View.