A common question I receive from Excel users learning Power Pivot is how to handle table that have different granularities. In reality, this terminology is not the one they use: the concept of “table granularity” is used mostly by Kimball practitioners, who immediately identify this scenario in a “two fact tables with different granularities” ...

Microsoft silently added the ISEMPTY function to the DAX language in Analysis Services build 11.00.3368 (SQL Server 2012 SP1 CU4). This function is particularly important in DAXMD (when you use DAX to query a Multidimensional model), because produces a much better execution plan in OLAP than the alternatives based on COUNTROWS. There is an ...

I recently published the ABC Classification article in www.daxpatterns.com, which is a more structured and organized way that recap what I already described in this blog a few years ago (see ABC Analysis in PowerPivot). The pattern describe how to implement the classification through calculated columns, so we consider it a specialization of the ...

The recent Time Patterns article published in www.daxpatterns.com contains many DAX formulas that I hope will be useful to anyone is interest in implementing time-related calculations in DAX without relying on the Time Intelligence functions. There are several reasons for doing that: Custom Calendar: if you have special requirement for your ...

If you use DISTINCTCOUNT measures in DAX, you know performance are usually great, but you might have also observed that the performance slow down when the resulting number is high (depending on other conditions, it starts decreasing between 1 and 2 million as a result). If you have seen that, there is a good news. Microsoft fixed this issue ...

DAX includes several statistical functions, such as average, variance, and standard deviation. Other common algorithms require some DAX code and we published an article about common Statistical Patterns on www.daxpatterns.com, including: Average Moving Average Variance Standard Deviation Median Mode Percentile Quartile I ...

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 ...

Apparently you cannot pass an argument to a DAX measure. In reality, you can interact with a slicer that has the only purpose of representing a parameter used by a DAX formula. You just create a table in the Power Pivot or Tabular data model, without creating any relationship with other tables in the same data model. This techniques is similar to ...

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 ...

The first pattern published on www.daxpatterns.com is the Cumulative Total. Another common name of this calculation is Running Total, but the reason why we named the pattern in this way is that we identify all those scenarios in which you want to obtain a value, at a certain date, that corresponds to the result of a number of transactions executed ...