Last year I and Alberto Ferrari wrote a new edition of the Analysis Services Tabular book, which official title is Tabular Modeling in SQL Server Analysis Services (2nd Edition). Some delay in editing and production delayed the printing, but the book is finally available, so I can present it with a dedicated blog post, explaining its goals and ...

More than one year ago, I and Alberto Ferrari started to work on DirectQuery, exploring the new implementation appeared in Analysis Services 2016 for the Tabular models, which uses the same engine of Power BI. The previous version of DirectQuery appeared in SSAS Tabular 2012 was very slow and suffered of performance issues also using small models. ...

If you work with Power Pivot, Power BI, or Analysis Services Tabular, you probably already know VertiPaq Analyzer. If you never used it, with the new release 1.7 you have another couple of very good reason to try it. VertiPaq Analyzer is a Power Pivot workbook that extracts information from data management views (DMVs) of a Tabular model. It can ...

Microsoft recently released the Service Pack 1 for SQL Server 2016. If you use Analysis Services, installing this update is a no-brainer and you should do that as soon as possible. The reason are all related to memory management. Microsoft officially described this in a blog post on MSDN. I suggest you reading it, but let me describe in a more ...

If you already installed Analysis Services 2016, you should change the MemoryHeapType setting. There is a new default value (-1), which is an automatic choice that currently applies a new hybrid allocator (which has the number 5 as a value). It should resolve the memory fragmentation problem causing performance issue as described in an article I ...

I recently wrote an article about how to Create Static Tables in DAX Using the DATATABLE Function. Such a new DAX feature (the DATATABLE function) will be likely used in the upcoming Analysis Services Tabular 2016, but it is not used neither in Power BI nor in Power Pivot to create static table. For this reason, I think that it could be useful to ...

The 2015 has been an amazing year for Power BI. One year ago, I was commenting on this blog the public preview of Power BI dashboards. A few days ago, Microsoft released the December update of Power BI Desktop and several updates of the Power BI service. In one year, we moved from a situation where Microsoft seemed (and actually was) too slow in ...

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 SP2 Cumulative Update 8. Microsoft discussed some of these improvements in this blog post: ...

After many years of helping several companies around the world creating small and large data models using SQL Server Analysis Services Tabular, I’ve seen a common performance issue that is underestimated at design time. The VertiPaq engine in SSAS Tabular is amazingly fast, you can have billion of rows in a table and query performance are ...

I and Alberto Ferrari recently completed the writing of The Definitive Guide to DAX, and we spent months to correctly describe the internals of evaluation context in this language. There are many details that make data model working with both DAX and MDX, and sometime there are behaviors that are not intuitive to understand. A function that seems ...