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” ...

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 ...

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 ...

I’m very proud to announce the official launch of the DAX Patterns website! http://www.daxpatterns.com I and Alberto Ferrari worked on this idea for a really long time. Many business scenarios can be solved in Power Pivot using always the same models, with just a few minor changes. This is especially true for the DAX formulas required. Sometime, ...

Last week I wrote an article about Natural Hierarchies in Power Pivot and Tabular where I show why it is important creating natural hierarchies for performance reasons. I’d like to spend a few words about the reasons why this is so important, so you might read the article in advance before moving forward. I had to investigate on a performance ...

In the last months I and Alberto Ferrari worked on many consulting engagements about designing Tabular models or optimizing existing ones. One of the strength of the Tabular model compared to Multidimensional is the performance of distinct count measures. Now, being faster doesn’t necessarily mean getting an immediate answer, and several times we ...