I have seen many different types of custom calendars implemented in Power Pivot, Tabular, and DAX. I also wrote several articles (week based calendars and time patterns). However, there is a scenario that is hard to manage with the classical approaches, which I discussed in a new article. Suppose you want to implement custom comparisons. For ...

Less than one year ago I published a pattern about ABC Classification in DAX. Such a pattern was static, so an item (e.g. customer, product) is classified statically when you process a Power Pivot or Tabular model, so filters and slicers querying data do not affect the classification’s results. In the following weeks I discussed with Alberto ...

In 2014 we published several articles in the DAX Patterns web site. We’ll continue to publish new patterns in 2015 (the first one later this month!), but in the meantime we created a first printed version of the patterns available: DAX Patterns 2015. It might seem strange, but we really received several requests for a book version of the ...

A feature that many people require in SSAS Tabular is the ability to refactor existing names, doing a correspondent rename in all existing objects in the model. I agree that this is an important feature that should be added in the development environment, but this will help only the development cycle. Once you release a Tabular model, the names ...

The last update of Power Query finally supports Analysis Services Multidimensional and Tabular. I waited this version for a very long time, but now it's finally here! Chris Webb already wrote an interesting blog post with several useful link and informations.  You can connect to both Multidimensional and ...

At the last PASS Summit I received an interesting question: is there a list of all the useful (I would say necessary…) tools for DAX developers? My answer was… “no, but this is an interesting topic for a blog post”. In the meantime, I thought that a page to keep updated would have been better, and of course an easy-to-remember URL is equally ...

SQL Server Analysis Services is a product that does not have its own product code, being sold as part of SQL Server. I think that also Microsoft does not know (and cannot know) the exact number of users. For this reason, it’s also more difficult to analyze the effective usage of the two different model types: Multidimensional and Tabular. Thus, ...

Alberto Ferrari wrote an interesting article about a strange behavior of AutoExist in normalized data models. I always say that a star schema is the best practice in Power Pivot and Tabular data modeling. The issue described by Alberto is another good reason to avoid snowflake schemas. I think that an example is better than many words. Consider ...

I recently delivered the online session Create your first SSAS Tabular Model at 24HOP Pass Summit, which recording is now available here. I received many questions and did not have enough time, so I answer now in this blog post. How do you prevent a user from aggregating certain measures where the result would be invalid (example: unit margin %)? ...

The adoption of DAX is slowly growing and we can see that from comments to article, blog posts, web site traffic (including DAX Formatter usage). For this reason, the demand for more advanced training about DAX is also increasing. We had great feedback from our last white papers (Using Tabular Models in a Large-scale Commercial Solution and SSAS ...