A few weeks ago I received a question that inspired me in writing this article about how to handle data at different granularities in PowerPivot and BISM Tabular. I think this is a common pattern when you have a budget table that contains data at an aggregated level (like month and product category) and you want to compare it with sales that are ...

I just published the article Converting MDX to DAX – First Steps on the renewed SQLBI web site about converting MDX to DAX. The reason is that with BISM Tabular in Analysis Services 2012 you will be able to write queries in both DAX and MDX. If you already know MDX, you might wonder how to “translate” your MDX knowledge in DAX. I think that this ...

Alberto Ferrari published an interesting blog post regarding how to write particular calculations over a parent-child hierarchy in PowerPivot Denali (and in BISM Tabular, of course). One case is the Sum of Leaves (summing only the leaves of a parent-child hierarchy) and the other is the Sum of Children (computes all the nodes that are descendants ...

Surfing on the web, here, I came into this intriguing question: How do we ask something like ''Show me how many customers have an iPad but don't have a book?'' We are speaking about a sales analysis where the canonical entities are Customers, Products and Sales. Moreover, because we have been used to speak about cycles since many years ago, ...

During TechEd 2011, Microsoft announced an important update to its BI roadmap. The reason why this is important is related to the previous announcement, which I discussed in November 2010 by including links to several sources and comments. At PASS Summit 2010 the announcement regarding the next version of SQL Server, codenamed ''Denali'', ...

Microsoft recently announced a new roadmap for its BI architecture. The next version of SQL Server, codenamed “Denali”, is going to introduce a new semantic model named BISM (Business Intelligence Semantic Model). Analysis Services will host it and it will be queryable through MDX and DAX. DAX has been introduced in PowerPivot as an expression ...