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 an article about Sorting Dates Columns in PowerPivot v2 and BISM Tabular on SQLBI website. In reality, the article is about sorting columns by other columns in a Tabular model, but the common scenario in which you need that is in a Calendar table where you can have columns that have to be sorted by using a combination of other ...

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 ...

If you are looking to create many-to-many relationships based models in PowerPivot and in BISM Tabular, probably one day you will be interested in using them with Power View (formerly codename “Crescent”). There is a very bad news for you: it appears that, at least in its first release, Power View will not support this scenario, showing a behavior ...

Boyan Penev announced the availability of DateStream project on CodePlex: it is a data feed that can be consumed by PowerPivot but also to generate a calendar table for any type of usage. Yes, Analysis Services has a wizard, but when you are in a hurry why not simply consume a ready to go data source? In fact, this data feed is published for free ...

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 ...

In many workshops and sessions about PowerPivot the most frequently asked question has always been: how can I automate the PowerPivot Data Refresh in Excel? I talked about that a few weeks ago. The sad answer is that this feature is not supported in PowerPivot v1. And from what I can see in CTP3, it will still be unsupported in PowerPivot v2, ...

As I already announced on this blog some weeks ago, there will be a PowerPivot Workshop in Lisbon (Portugal) on September 19-20, 2011. The evening of September 19 there will be also a free community event in Lisbon where Alberto will speak: you can find all details and registration link here. We know that August is an holiday month for many ...

In PowerPivot you can import data from several sources and it is often the case that you import a DateTime column from a database. From an analytical point of view, you usually make analysis over dates (day/month/year/quarter/week) and over time (hour/minute) but to do that it is often useful to have two independent set of attributes: one for the ...

I've written here before about Data Education, the training company I recently launched, building off my previous company Boston SQL Training. Things have moved along quickly, and I and the rest of the Data Education staff are very happy to announce a jam-packed fall and winter course roster. We'll be announcing even more classes later in the ...