You can use the USERELATIONSHIP function in DAX to apply a non-active relationship in a particular DAX calculation. This approach is usually simple in a measure (just use USERELATIOSHIP in one of the filter arguments of CALCULATE) but as soon as you try using it in a calculated column, you can find several issues. In the article USERELATIONSHIP ...

Alberto Ferrari recently recorded a free short video introduction about what is time intelligence. When you have to perform time-related calculations in Power Pivot or in Analysis Services Tabular, you have to rely on some DAX expressions. There are specific functions grouped in a “Time Intelligence” section in the on-line documentation, but it’s ...

I recently wrote an article on SQLBI describing the dynamic calculation of stock inventory in DAX. With this technique, you can avoid creating a snapshot fact table just to store the inventory stock for every day and every product, creating a table that in certain business is huge and expensive, especially if you have to load it in memory. I also ...

Alberto Ferrari wrote a very interesting white paper about DAX query plans. We published it on a page where we'll gather articles and tools about DAX query plans: http://www.sqlbi.com/topics/query-plans/ I reviewed the paper and this is the result of many months of study - we know that we just scratched the surface of this topic, also because we ...

In June I and Alberto will deliver a pre-conference seminar at both TechEd North America (New Orleans, LA) and TechEd Europe (Madrid, Spain). This day is a very good quickstart for those of you that still didn't complete one of our books, or those of you that missed one of our workshop about Tabular or PowerPivot. If you ...

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 ...

One year after the release of SQL Server 2012 I see the growing demand for DAX. There are two reasons for that: an higher number of PowerPivot users started to build more complex data models, and SSAS Tabular is starting to be adopted by a larger number of companies, with and without a previous experience on former versions of Analysis ...

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 ...

Are you working with SSAS Tabular? Are you an experienced PowerPivot user? In both cases, you should be aware that there is only one skill that is important for PowerPivot and SSAS Tabular, and it is the DAX language. I and Alberto have been using DAX since 2010, wrote several books containing several chapters about DAX and we know that there is ...

Apparently Excel does not offer a way to import data in Excel by using a DAX query on Analysis Services. The Data Connection Wizard seems to offers only the ability to create a PivotTable when you connect to Tabular, but not a Table (see the Table option disabled in the next picture). However, the workaround is to create a connection file and ...