I published an article describing how to implement the grouping of sales transactions by age of customer at the moment of the transaction by using PowerPivot or Analysis Services. The same pattern can be used also for any kind of banding operation, this specific case is useful also to recycle the formula that gets the exact age of the customer for ...

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 ...

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 ...

DAX offers a set of Time Intelligence functions that simplify writing DAX expressions such as YTD, YOY and other time-related calculations. However, these functions only works when some assumptions are valid: your periods should be “natural” months and quarter. Some industries, such as retail and manufacturing, are used to accounting periods that ...

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 ...

A few weeks ago I received a question that inspired me in writing this article about how to handle data at different granularities in PowerPivot and BISM Tabular. I think this is a common pattern when you have a budget table that contains data at an aggregated level (like month and product category) and you want to compare it with sales that are ...

I just published the article Converting MDX to DAX – First Steps on the renewed SQLBI web site about converting MDX to DAX. The reason is that with BISM Tabular in Analysis Services 2012 you will be able to write queries in both DAX and MDX. If you already know MDX, you might wonder how to “translate” your MDX knowledge in DAX. I think that this ...

Javier Guillén wrote several blog post about how to implement certain common calculations in PowerPivot. It is interesting to read his posts not only because of the solutions he propose, but also because he uses several techniques that can be applied in other scenarios. Here is a list of posts and reasons to read:Calculating Moving Averages in ...

Alberto anticipated me announcing our next edition of the PowerPivot Workshop in Lisbon (Portugal) on September 19-20, 2011. The announcement has been published also on the SQLPort website in Portuguese! But remember, the workshop will be entirely in English! In this edition of the workshop we are integrating in the course the new feature of the ...

Alberto Ferrari published an interesting blog post regarding how to write particular calculations over a parent-child hierarchy in PowerPivot Denali (and in BISM Tabular, of course). One case is the Sum of Leaves (summing only the leaves of a parent-child hierarchy) and the other is the Sum of Children (computes all the nodes that are descendants ...