I recently read the blog post from James Serra Tabular model: Not ready for prime time? (read also the comments because there are discussions about a few points raised by James) and the following post from Christian Wade Multidimensional or Tabular. In the last 2 years I worked with many companies adopting Tabular in different scenarios and I ...

I recently wrote an article on SQLBI about the semi-additive measures in DAX. I included the formulas common calculations and there is an interesting point that worth a longer digression: the difference between LASTDATE and MAX (which is similar to FIRSTDATE and MIN – I just describe the former, for the latter just replace the correspondent ...

You can use the USERELATIONSHIP function in DAX to apply a non-active relationship in a particular DAX calculation. This approach is usually simple in a measure (just use USERELATIOSHIP in one of the filter arguments of CALCULATE) but as soon as you try using it in a calculated column, you can find several issues. In the article USERELATIONSHIP ...

Recently I received a request from a reader related to the handling of missing or invalid dates in Tabular (but the same can be applied to Power Pivot). In the Analysis Services Tabular book, we wrote that you can insert a special row in the Date table with an ID that can be used to map all the rows in the fact table that don’t have a valid date. ...

I recently wrote an article that describes how to calculate a measure (such a sales, but it could be anything else) considering for each customer its first 12 months, then months 13-24 and so on. In practice, for every customer you have a different range of dates to consider, that starts on the date of its first order. In the past I implemented ...

Alberto Ferrari recently recorded a free short video introduction about what is time intelligence. When you have to perform time-related calculations in Power Pivot or in Analysis Services Tabular, you have to rely on some DAX expressions. There are specific functions grouped in a “Time Intelligence” section in the on-line documentation, but it’s ...

I recently wrote an article on SQLBI describing the dynamic calculation of stock inventory in DAX. With this technique, you can avoid creating a snapshot fact table just to store the inventory stock for every day and every product, creating a table that in certain business is huge and expensive, especially if you have to load it in memory. I also ...

In the last weeks the Microsoft BI buzzword has been Power BI for Office 365, which will be available soon in preview. I read a few comments about the fact that there is a constant discussion about the future but a lack of information and discussion about what is really used and required today in the real world. I think it is a good news that ...

Alberto Ferrari wrote a very interesting white paper about DAX query plans. We published it on a page where we'll gather articles and tools about DAX query plans: http://www.sqlbi.com/topics/query-plans/ I reviewed the paper and this is the result of many months of study - we know that we just scratched the surface of this topic, also because we ...

The sessions recorded at TechEd 2013 are online. I and Alberto Ferrari delivered the same sessions and the recording are available for both TechEd North America and TechEd Europe. It’s nice for me being able to compare two deliveries of the same session. In theory, the second delivery (Europe) should have been improved based on feedback of ...