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 ...

This year is going to end, Maya failed their predictions and while this is bad for predictive industry, it’s also good for all of us! We’ve seen many news in Microsoft BI stack: Excel 2013 has been RTM’d – its General Availability is expected in early 2013 but many early adopters are already using it daily (myself included) PowerPivot and ...

Next week I and Alberto Ferrari will be in Seattle at PASS Summit 2012. You can meet us at our sessions, at a book signing and hopefully watching some other session during the conference. Here are our appointments: Thursday, November 08, 2012, 10:15 AM - 11:45 AM – Alberto Ferrari – Room 606-607 Querying and Optimizing DAX (BIA-321-S) ...

I recently published a set of rules for DAX code formatting. The following is an example of what I obtain: CALCULATE (     SUMX (         Orders,         Orders[Amount]     ),     FILTER ( ...

Recently I had to write a DAX formula containing a LASTDATE within the logical condition of a FILTER: I found that its behavior was not the one I expected and I further investigated. At the end, I wrote my findings in this article on SQLBI, which can be applied to any Time Intelligence function with a <dates> argument. The key ...

In September 2006 I had announced in this blog the release of the first version of The Many-to-Many Revolution, a whitepaper that describes how to leverage the many-to-many dimension relationships feature that had being available since Analysis Services 2005. The paper contains many generic patterns that can be applied in many common data ...

It seems that the next SQLBits will be larger than ever! The SQLBits 9 will take place in Liverpool from 29th September to 1st October 2011. It will be hard to get a nicer weather than in Brighton, but we will try to bring a bit of sun from Italy! I and Alberto will deliver a whole training day on September 29th: DAX Deep Dive will be a full ...

The Analysis Services team just posted a blog entry with a few useful links to jumpstart your experience with Tabular project in Analysis Services ''Denali''. In these early days I read several messages asking for clarification about the names and acronyms used in Denali. For a complete description I suggest you to read the Analysis Services - ...

In the last months I talked mostly about PowerPivot, but Analysis Services is still growing and a very good sign of that is the number of downloads of The Many-to-Many Revolution whitepaper, who has been published almost 5 years ago and recently surpassed 20,000 downloads. The download trend is a constant line made of tens of downloads every ...

Microsoft recently announced a new roadmap for its BI architecture. The next version of SQL Server, codenamed “Denali”, is going to introduce a new semantic model named BISM (Business Intelligence Semantic Model). Analysis Services will host it and it will be queryable through MDX and DAX. DAX has been introduced in PowerPivot as an expression ...