I am so happy to announce that The Definitive Guide to DAX is finally available! I and Alberto Ferrari spent one year writing this book, and several years collecting the knowledge necessary to do that. The complete title is The Definitive Guide to DAX: Business intelligence with Microsoft Excel, SQL Server Analysis Services, and Power BI. You can ...

In the last few weeks I and Teo Lachev took the ownership of DAX Editor code. It is an add-in for Visual Studio that allows you to edit DAX measures in a text editor instead of using the Measure grid. It also provides other features (such as editing measures of an online Tabular database and performing a few queries). The user interface is not ...

After the initial release of DAX Studio 2.0, in December 2014, I started working on a few features to analyze performance of DAX queries. Darren Gosbell implemented many other features, and Daniele Perilli helped us with the graphics of the UI. We certainly can do more, but I think that the current feature set of the new release is good enough to ...

Darren Gosbell announced on his blog that DAX Studio 2.0 is available. This new release has a completely new user interface, a renewed architecture and also work as a standalone executable without Excel. Yes, you read it right. You can use DAX Studio on a server without having to run it in Excel. You can now connect with Remote Desktop to your ...

The last update of Power Query finally supports Analysis Services Multidimensional and Tabular. I waited this version for a very long time, but now it's finally here! Chris Webb already wrote an interesting blog post with several useful link and informations.  You can connect to both Multidimensional and ...

At the last PASS Summit I received an interesting question: is there a list of all the useful (I would say necessary…) tools for DAX developers? My answer was… “no, but this is an interesting topic for a blog post”. In the meantime, I thought that a page to keep updated would have been better, and of course an easy-to-remember URL is equally ...

During the last PASS Summit I and Alberto Ferrari had long discussions at SQL Clinic with some of the developers of our loved tools. Sometime you really have to dig in the internals of certain feature to understand why there are some “unexpected” behaviors for certain functions. One of the discussions was about SUMMARIZE. This function can be very ...

Alberto Ferrari wrote an interesting article about a strange behavior of AutoExist in normalized data models. I always say that a star schema is the best practice in Power Pivot and Tabular data modeling. The issue described by Alberto is another good reason to avoid snowflake schemas. I think that an example is better than many words. Consider ...

The adoption of DAX is slowly growing and we can see that from comments to article, blog posts, web site traffic (including DAX Formatter usage). For this reason, the demand for more advanced training about DAX is also increasing. We had great feedback from our last white papers (Using Tabular Models in a Large-scale Commercial Solution and SSAS ...

I recently wrote a short article about filtering data in DAX. In the last month I’ve seen a growing number of people with a SQL background going to Tabular, without having a previous experience of MDX. In my opinion, learning DAX is easier if you try to match its features to SQL rather than to MDX. The reality is that DAX is somewhere in the ...