Last year I and Alberto Ferrari wrote a new edition of the Analysis Services Tabular book, which official title is Tabular Modeling in SQL Server Analysis Services (2nd Edition). Some delay in editing and production delayed the printing, but the book is finally available, so I can present it with a dedicated blog post, explaining its goals and ...

More than one year ago, I and Alberto Ferrari started to work on DirectQuery, exploring the new implementation appeared in Analysis Services 2016 for the Tabular models, which uses the same engine of Power BI. The previous version of DirectQuery appeared in SSAS Tabular 2012 was very slow and suffered of performance issues also using small models. ...

If you work with Power Pivot, Power BI, or Analysis Services Tabular, you probably already know VertiPaq Analyzer. If you never used it, with the new release 1.7 you have another couple of very good reason to try it. VertiPaq Analyzer is a Power Pivot workbook that extracts information from data management views (DMVs) of a Tabular model. It can ...

Microsoft recently released the Service Pack 1 for SQL Server 2016. If you use Analysis Services, installing this update is a no-brainer and you should do that as soon as possible. The reason are all related to memory management. Microsoft officially described this in a blog post on MSDN. I suggest you reading it, but let me describe in a more ...

The 2015 has been an amazing year for Power BI. One year ago, I was commenting on this blog the public preview of Power BI dashboards. A few days ago, Microsoft released the December update of Power BI Desktop and several updates of the Power BI service. In one year, we moved from a situation where Microsoft seemed (and actually was) too slow in ...

After many years of helping several companies around the world creating small and large data models using SQL Server Analysis Services Tabular, I’ve seen a common performance issue that is underestimated at design time. The VertiPaq engine in SSAS Tabular is amazingly fast, you can have billion of rows in a table and query performance are ...

During the writing of The Definitive Guide to DAX I wanted a simple way to analyze the content and distribution of data compressed in the VertiPaq engine, used by Analysis Services Tabular, Power Pivot and Power BI models. I always relied on BISM Memory Report (thanks Kasper!), but when you focus on a single database there are a number of details ...

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 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 ...

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 ...