I recently wrote a few articles about a new function in DAX and the use of variables. For those of you using Power BI or Azure Analysis Services, you always have access to the latest version of the language. Well, in reality I see that new features appears in Power BI Desktop first, and shortly after in Azure Analysis Services. I’m also working ...

In the next three weeks I will deliver many speeches and training in United States. Here is the list: June 11, 2017: Precon Data Modeling with Power BI at Microsoft Data Insights Summit (Seattle, WA) June 12, 2017: Workshop DAX 101 at Microsoft Data Insights Summit (Seattle, WA) June 13, 2017: Workshop Advanced DAX at Microsoft Data ...

In the last few years, I and Alberto Ferrari assisted many users of Power Pivot and Power BI who wanted to create their reports using these tools and were struggling with getting the desired numbers from their data. The first approach of an Excel user is to look for a function, or a more complex DAX expression, that can implement the calculation ...

If you run SSAS Tabular or Power BI, please help me in gathering some performance data for a study I'm doing about Formula Engine performance following these steps:  1) Copy the PowerShell code below in a script Benchmark.ps1, modifying serverName, ssasInstanceName and databaseName so that they point to an existing database of an instance ...

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. ...

I recently wrote an article to described in more details the syntax of the IN operator in DAX, which is available in Power BI and in the CTP of the next release of Analysis Services. Jeffrey Wang wrote a blog post about the IN operator a few months ago, so I waited some time to include more details about how it internally works ...

When you use the time intelligence functions in DAX, it is relatively easy to filter the same dates selection in the previous year by using the SAMEPERIODLASTYEAR or DATEADD functions. However, if you follow the best practices, it is likely that you have a full date table for the current year, which includes many days in the future. If you are in ...

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 ...

If you think that the end of the year would have been a quiet time because the Power BI team will skip their monthly release (but are we sure?), you might be reassured (or disappointed depending on your perspective) looking at the news I have in this blog post. SSAS Tabular vNext CTP 1.1 In 2017 Microsoft will release a new version of ...