A few days ago I published the article FILTER vs CALCULATETABLE: optimization using cardinality estimation, where I try to explain why the sentence “CALCULATETABLE is better than FILTER” is not always true. In reality, CALCULATETABLE internally might use FILTER for every logical expression you use as a filter argument. What really matters is the ...

You can use the USERELATIONSHIP function in DAX to apply a non-active relationship in a particular DAX calculation. This approach is usually simple in a measure (just use USERELATIOSHIP in one of the filter arguments of CALCULATE) but as soon as you try using it in a calculated column, you can find several issues. In the article USERELATIONSHIP ...

Recently I received a request from a reader related to the handling of missing or invalid dates in Tabular (but the same can be applied to Power Pivot). In the Analysis Services Tabular book, we wrote that you can insert a special row in the Date table with an ID that can be used to map all the rows in the fact table that don’t have a valid date. ...

Alberto Ferrari recently recorded a free short video introduction about what is time intelligence. When you have to perform time-related calculations in Power Pivot or in Analysis Services Tabular, you have to rely on some DAX expressions. There are specific functions grouped in a “Time Intelligence” section in the on-line documentation, but it’s ...

In the last weeks the Microsoft BI buzzword has been Power BI for Office 365, which will be available soon in preview. I read a few comments about the fact that there is a constant discussion about the future but a lack of information and discussion about what is really used and required today in the real world. I think it is a good news that ...

The sessions recorded at TechEd 2013 are online. I and Alberto Ferrari delivered the same sessions and the recording are available for both TechEd North America and TechEd Europe. It’s nice for me being able to compare two deliveries of the same session. In theory, the second delivery (Europe) should have been improved based on feedback of ...

I received this request in many courses, messages and also forum discussions: having an Analysis Services Tabular model, it would be nice being able to extract a correspondent PowerPivot data model. In order of priority, here are the specific feature people (including me) would like to see: Create an empty PowerPivot workbook with the same ...

If you think PowerPivot and Tabular are good tools but sometime the design tools are not fast/complete/flexible enough, please consider voting this suggestion on Connect to request a textual representation Tabular or PowerPivot Data Models. This is the simplest way to improve the Productivity of PowerPivot and Tabular ...

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’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 ...