An interesting confluence of events this week takes me both back to the past as I ponder the future! What gives? Well, the recent release of Tomislav Piasevoli’s (blog|twitter) new book, MDX with Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Analysis Services Cookbook, reminded me of my first meeting with him at a PASS Summit event a few years ago. Alas, I don’t ...

I think I’ve finally recovered (in more ways than one!) from PASS Summit 2010 in Seattle a mere few weeks ago. I seem to be eternally plagued with computer problems at every conference I attend, but always in different ways. Accordingly, I have devised different strategies for anticipating and coping with problems. I foiled this last disaster by ...

Another PASS Summit has come and gone, and a good time was had by all. The song at the opening keynote sums up the experience quite nicely, ''Simply the Best.'' My favorite quote of the week comes from Andy Leonard (blog| twitter) who tweeted on November 9, ''#sqlpass is a family reunion. :{>'' Oddly enough, Andy is one of the few people that I ...

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 ...

If you’re still unsure if the workshop I’ll deliver at PASS Summit the next November - “Creating a BI solution from A to Z” - is a good choice for you or not, you can get some more details reading the brief interview here: PASS Summit Post-Con Preview - Davide Mauri Where you’ll find answers to the following questions: Is there an audience ...

Many thanks to everyone who attended my session today, Introduction to MDX. There was so much more I wanted to say, but the constraint of an hour required me to be very selective and, as you might have noticed, to sacrifice the demos. After all, how exciting can it be to watch me execute a query? I thought it more important to provide you with ...

PASS Summit 2010 Pre & Post conference are out! This year I’ll deliver the “Creating BI Solution from A to Z” seminar in which, as the title implies, attendees will see how to create a BI solution starting from scratch. Going through the dimensional modeling and the creation of the Datawarehouse, the implementation of the ETL process with ...