One of the latest addition to DAX has been the ability to apply an external filter context to SUMMARIZECOLUMNS, which makes this function a perfect replacement for SUMMARIZE in DAX. In The Definitive Guide to DAX I introduced such a function, but at the time of writing it was used only by Power BI and it wasn’t possible to include it in a measure, ...

When you use the time intelligence functions in DAX, it is relatively easy to filter the same dates selection in the previous year by using the SAMEPERIODLASTYEAR or DATEADD functions. However, if you follow the best practices, it is likely that you have a full date table for the current year, which includes many days in the future. If you are in ...

If you work with Power Pivot, Power BI, or Analysis Services Tabular, you probably already know VertiPaq Analyzer. If you never used it, with the new release 1.7 you have another couple of very good reason to try it. VertiPaq Analyzer is a Power Pivot workbook that extracts information from data management views (DMVs) of a Tabular model. It can ...

The sessions of the event PASS Business Analytics Marathon, held the last December 2016 on 14th, were recorded and now they are available for online streaming! If you have missed one session in particular or the entire event, you can view or review your preferred topics. Each video is available on detail page of the related session, you can ...

If you think that the end of the year would have been a quiet time because the Power BI team will skip their monthly release (but are we sure?), you might be reassured (or disappointed depending on your perspective) looking at the news I have in this blog post. SSAS Tabular vNext CTP 1.1 In 2017 Microsoft will release a new version of ...

If you want to format a measure as date in Power BI, you need an expression returning a date/time data type. This is different from what you can do in Power Pivot and in SSAS Tabular, where you can format any numeric expression using a date and/or time format, and the conversion is implicitly done to perform such a visualization. The problem ...

Last week, a new version of DAX Studio (2.5.0) has been released. You can find a summary of the new features in the blog post from Darren Gosbell - thanks Darren for your wonderful job with this tool! My small contribution to this tool is mainly in the area of performance analysis. In the last few months, I worked on implementing a support for ...

One week ago I delivered a session for 24 hour of PASS, the online free event delivered by PASS (recordings are now available), where I introduced my one-day preconference Create a Power BI Solution in one day that I will deliver at PASS Summit 2016 in Seattle on October 25, 2016. As usual, there were too many questions and not enough time, so I ...

A recent change in the DAX language transformed the behavior of IF statement, so that it should not return BLANK but only TRUE/FALSE if the results should be logical expressions. In that case, the BLANK is transformed in a FALSE condition. For example, consider that the result of the following expression is FALSE and not BLANK: IF ( 1 = 1, ...

The summer is almost over and while we are working on new content (books and other for www.sqlbi.com), I already have the plans for this Autumn’s conferences. Microsoft Ignite 2016 – September 26-30, Atlanta, GA See what’s new in SQL Server Analysis Services 2016 Tabular Models Review DirectQuery in SSAS 2016, best practices and ...