In June I and Alberto will deliver a pre-conference seminar at both TechEd North America (New Orleans, LA) and TechEd Europe (Madrid, Spain). This day is a very good quickstart for those of you that still didn't complete one of our books, or those of you that missed one of our workshop about Tabular or PowerPivot. If you ...

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 recently published a video session on Project Botticelli web site regarding querying in DAX. You can write DAX queries to extract data from both PowerPivot and SSAS Tabular models. This could be particularly useful in three scenarios: Reports in Reporting Services Excel tables (used to populate other PowerPivot data models, for example) ...

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 ...

The DATE function in DAX has this simple syntax: DATE( <year>, <month>, <day> ) If you are like me, you never read the BOL notes that says in a clear way that it supports dates beginning with March 1, 1900. In fact, I was wrongly assuming that it would have supported any date that can be represented in a Date data type in Data ...

I recently published a set of rules for DAX code formatting. The following is an example of what I obtain: CALCULATE (     SUMX (         Orders,         Orders[Amount]     ),     FILTER ( ...

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 ...

The collaboration I and Alberto started with Project Botticelli is starting producing content. At this point we have three videos available: DAX in Action shows the power of DAX in PowerPivot solving common patterns not so easy or fast to solve in other languages DAX: Calculated Columns vs. Measures shows the difference between calculated ...

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 ...

In DAX you don’t have the LIKE operator and you have to use SEARCH instead. However, performance are not very good and it is better to use LEFT and RIGHT if you just need to compare the initial (or ending) match of a string. I just wrote an article about string comparison in DAX. During my exploration of LIKE replacement functions in DAX, I have ...