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 ...

I'm so happy that DAX Studio finally supports Excel 2013! As Darren Gosbell described in his blog, this release has a few internal changes that will better support future enhancements. I will port the code to capture the query plan for a query in this new release, but unfortunately it will require some weeks because I'm traveling a lot in these ...

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 ...

During a PowerPivot Workshop course we received an interesting question from a student: “Can I use LASTNONBLANK (and FIRSTNONBLANK) with a column which is not a date column?” The reason is that we introduce LASTNONBLANK in the Advanced Time Intelligence module, because its typical use case is on a date column. However, you can use these functions ...

Are you working with SSAS Tabular? Are you an experienced PowerPivot user? In both cases, you should be aware that there is only one skill that is important for PowerPivot and SSAS Tabular, and it is the DAX language. I and Alberto have been using DAX since 2010, wrote several books containing several chapters about DAX and we know that there is ...

Apparently Excel does not offer a way to import data in Excel by using a DAX query on Analysis Services. The Data Connection Wizard seems to offers only the ability to create a PivotTable when you connect to Tabular, but not a Table (see the Table option disabled in the next picture). However, the workaround is to create a connection file and ...

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 ...

Next week I and Alberto Ferrari will be in Seattle at PASS Summit 2012. You can meet us at our sessions, at a book signing and hopefully watching some other session during the conference. Here are our appointments: Thursday, November 08, 2012, 10:15 AM - 11:45 AM – Alberto Ferrari – Room 606-607 Querying and Optimizing DAX (BIA-321-S) ...

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 ( ...

Recently I had to write a DAX formula containing a LASTDATE within the logical condition of a FILTER: I found that its behavior was not the one I expected and I further investigated. At the end, I wrote my findings in this article on SQLBI, which can be applied to any Time Intelligence function with a <dates> argument. The key ...