During the writing of The Definitive Guide to DAX I wanted a simple way to analyze the content and distribution of data compressed in the VertiPaq engine, used by Analysis Services Tabular, Power Pivot and Power BI models. I always relied on BISM Memory Report (thanks Kasper!), but when you focus on a single database there are a number of details ...

A few days ago I published a new article on DAX Patterns web site describing how to implement Basket Analysis in DAX. This topic is a very classical one and is also covered in the many-to-many revolution white paper. It has been also discussed in several blog posts, listed here in historical order: Simple Basket Analysis in DAX by Chris Webb ...

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 ...

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 ...

During the last months I and Alberto worked in several projects using Analysis Services Tabular and we had to face real world issues, such as complex queries, large data volume, frequent data updates and so on. Sometime we faced the challenge of comparing Tabular performance with SQL Server. It seemed a non-sense, because even if the same core ...

We finally have the registration website for the community event about Tabular in Analysis Services in Amsterdam on April 16 evening that I introduced in my previous post - don't miss it, the registration are open (and limited!) at: http://passnl-april2012.eventbrite.com/ This is really a ''last-minute'' event, but we're pretty confident ...

In September 2006 I had announced in this blog the release of the first version of The Many-to-Many Revolution, a whitepaper that describes how to leverage the many-to-many dimension relationships feature that had being available since Analysis Services 2005. The paper contains many generic patterns that can be applied in many common data ...

If you have 30 seconds available, please vote the following items on Connect: https://connect.microsoft.com/SQLServer/feedback/details/679618/import-attribute-key-from-ssas-in-powerpivot When you import data coming from an Analysis Services cube in PowerPivot, you cannot import the attribute key value. Only the attribute name is included in the ...

As Chris announced in his blog, some of the sessions from the SQLBits 8 in Brighton are already available (for free!). Yesterday I watched more than half of my BISM Introduction session just to check that no NDA was broken. And, believe it or not, the session had to be really “balanced” in order to not disclose anything of the news announced at ...

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 ...