I published an article describing how to implement the grouping of sales transactions by age of customer at the moment of the transaction by using PowerPivot or Analysis Services. The same pattern can be used also for any kind of banding operation, this specific case is useful also to recycle the formula that gets the exact age of the customer for ...

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 ...

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 ...

Microsoft published an interesting article about how to optimize memory consumption of a PowerPivot Data Model in Excel 2013. All these suggestions are also valid for SSAS Tabular. I also wrote an article Checklist for Memory Optimizations in PowerPivot and Tabular Models with a summary of the best practices. The short list of things to ...

DAX offers a set of Time Intelligence functions that simplify writing DAX expressions such as YTD, YOY and other time-related calculations. However, these functions only works when some assumptions are valid: your periods should be “natural” months and quarter. Some industries, such as retail and manufacturing, are used to accounting periods that ...

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 ...

Short update about community events in Europe where I will speak. On October 11 I will present DAX in Action in Köln - all details in the PASS local chapter here: http://www.sqlpass.de/Regionen/Deutschland/K%C3%B6lnBonnD%C3%BCsseldorf.aspx I will be speaking at a community event in Copenhagen on November 21, 2012. The session will be Excel 2013 ...

I hadn’t time yesterday to write a blog post before of the beginning of the day and I recover now that I’m already back to Europe. I spent many hours at the Microsoft booth meeting people who asked questions about Tabular, Power View and PowerPivot. I have to say that I’m really glad so many people started using PowerPivot and of the large ...

A few weeks ago I received a question that inspired me in writing this article about how to handle data at different granularities in PowerPivot and BISM Tabular. I think this is a common pattern when you have a budget table that contains data at an aggregated level (like month and product category) and you want to compare it with sales that are ...

I just published an article about Sorting Dates Columns in PowerPivot v2 and BISM Tabular on SQLBI website. In reality, the article is about sorting columns by other columns in a Tabular model, but the common scenario in which you need that is in a Calendar table where you can have columns that have to be sorted by using a combination of other ...