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 ...

When you write a DAX formula that is not trivial, you end up having a complex expression that is not really readable. I think that the same problem affect in part all Excel users, but in Excel you can easily split a formula in many steps, using different cells. This is not always possible in Tabular, because moving a sub-expression in a separate ...

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 ...