In June I and Alberto will deliver a pre-conference seminar at both TechEd North America (New Orleans, LA) and TechEd Europe (Madrid, Spain). This day is a very good quickstart for those of you that still didn't complete one of our books, or those of you that missed one of our workshop about Tabular or PowerPivot. If you ...

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 ...

One year after the release of SQL Server 2012 I see the growing demand for DAX. There are two reasons for that: an higher number of PowerPivot users started to build more complex data models, and SSAS Tabular is starting to be adopted by a larger number of companies, with and without a previous experience on former versions of Analysis ...

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 ...

On April 23 I will present DAX in Action in London and Cardiff at SQLLunch event.How is it possible I will be in two places at the same time?This will be a remote presentation delivered in two locations, where you can have lunch while watching the session. What is this session about? This is the session description:Tabular is the new SSAS ...

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 ...

I’ve been interviewed by Greg Low in SQL Down Under show 58, and this is *not* an April fool! We talked for one hour about Tabular, Multidimensional, Data Warehouse and just a little bit about music (you can discover which music genre I’m used to listen…). You can hear this interview from the SQL Down Under Show 58 page (it is an MP3 format) and ...

I recently received a question about the memory required to run a Process Defrag on a Tabular model in Analysis Services. The Process Defrag is useful when you run incremental processing of a table frequently, or when some of the values in the dictionary are no longer used in the table, for example if you process the same partition ...

I recently published a video session on Project Botticelli web site regarding querying in DAX. You can write DAX queries to extract data from both PowerPivot and SSAS Tabular models. This could be particularly useful in three scenarios: Reports in Reporting Services Excel tables (used to populate other PowerPivot data models, for example) ...