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 ...

I and Alberto Ferrari will speak at SQLBits XI (Nottingham, UK – May 2-4, 2013) and there are many good reasons to join us there, especially if you are interested to DAX! Here are our sessions: Thursday, 02 May 2013 – Training Day - From 0 to DAX The entire day is dedicated to learning DAX, starting from the syntax and going forward ...

DAX offers a set of Time Intelligence functions that simplify writing DAX expressions such as YTD, YOY and other time-related calculations. However, these functions only works when some assumptions are valid: your periods should be “natural” months and quarter. Some industries, such as retail and manufacturing, are used to accounting periods that ...

Are you working with SSAS Tabular? Are you an experienced PowerPivot user? In both cases, you should be aware that there is only one skill that is important for PowerPivot and SSAS Tabular, and it is the DAX language. I and Alberto have been using DAX since 2010, wrote several books containing several chapters about DAX and we know that there is ...

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 ...

Next week I and Alberto Ferrari will be in Seattle at PASS Summit 2012. You can meet us at our sessions, at a book signing and hopefully watching some other session during the conference. Here are our appointments: Thursday, November 08, 2012, 10:15 AM - 11:45 AM – Alberto Ferrari – Room 606-607 Querying and Optimizing DAX (BIA-321-S) ...

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 ...

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 ...

If you have a Slowly Changing Dimension (SCD) Type 2 for your customer and you want to calculate the number of distinct customers that bought a product, you cannot use the simple formula: Customers := DISTINCTCOUNT( FactTable[Customer Id] ) ) because it would return the number of distinct versions of customers. What you really want to do is to ...

The SQL Server Profiler provides you many information regarding the internal behavior of DAX queries sent to a BISM Tabular model. Similar to MDX, also in DAX there is a Formula Engine (FE) and a Storage Engine (SE). The SE is usually handled by Vertipaq (unless you are using DirectQuery mode) and Vertipaq SE Query classes of events gives you a ...