A few days ago I published a new article on DAX Patterns web site describing how to implement Basket Analysis in DAX. This topic is a very classical one and is also covered in the many-to-many revolution white paper. It has been also discussed in several blog posts, listed here in historical order: Simple Basket Analysis in DAX by Chris Webb ...

A common question I receive from Excel users learning Power Pivot is how to handle table that have different granularities. In reality, this terminology is not the one they use: the concept of “table granularity” is used mostly by Kimball practitioners, who immediately identify this scenario in a “two fact tables with different granularities” ...

Microsoft silently added the ISEMPTY function to the DAX language in Analysis Services build 11.00.3368 (SQL Server 2012 SP1 CU4). This function is particularly important in DAXMD (when you use DAX to query a Multidimensional model), because produces a much better execution plan in OLAP than the alternatives based on COUNTROWS. There is an ...

I recently published the ABC Classification article in www.daxpatterns.com, which is a more structured and organized way that recap what I already described in this blog a few years ago (see ABC Analysis in PowerPivot). The pattern describe how to implement the classification through calculated columns, so we consider it a specialization of the ...

DAX includes several statistical functions, such as average, variance, and standard deviation. Other common algorithms require some DAX code and we published an article about common Statistical Patterns on www.daxpatterns.com, including: Average Moving Average Variance Standard Deviation Median Mode Percentile Quartile I ...

In the last two weeks we published two new patterns of www.daxpatterns.com: Static Segmentation Dynamic Segmentation These two patterns offers solutions to the general problem of classifying an item by the value of a measure or of a column in your Power Pivot or Tabular data model. For example, you might create groups of products based on ...

A few days ago I published the article FILTER vs CALCULATETABLE: optimization using cardinality estimation, where I try to explain why the sentence “CALCULATETABLE is better than FILTER” is not always true. In reality, CALCULATETABLE internally might use FILTER for every logical expression you use as a filter argument. What really matters is the ...

Apparently you cannot pass an argument to a DAX measure. In reality, you can interact with a slicer that has the only purpose of representing a parameter used by a DAX formula. You just create a table in the Power Pivot or Tabular data model, without creating any relationship with other tables in the same data model. This techniques is similar to ...

Creating Distinct Count calculations in DAX is pretty easy when the target of the operation is a column in the “fact table” of a star schema. When you want to apply the DISTINCTCOUNT function to a dimension attribute (such as Customer Country, Product Model, Employee Department, and so on), you need to apply one of the techniques described in ...

I hadn’t time in the last two months for new blog posts, but with some good reasons! I’ve been busy putting DAX Formatter online and writing some other stuffs that I will be happy to share very soon, aside from daily engagements with customers, of course. But the waiting is almost over, and in the meantime I’d like to share the schedule for ...