Spring is a conferences’ season and the upcoming one is no exception. I will be speaking at PASS Business Analytics Conference 2013, which will be the first event this year, so I’d like to spend a few words about my sessions. PASS Business Analytics Conference 2013 April 10-12, 2013 | Chicago, IL – United States This conference is targeted to ...

Are you working with SSAS Tabular? Are you an experienced PowerPivot user? In both cases, you should be aware that there is only one skill that is important for PowerPivot and SSAS Tabular, and it is the DAX language. I and Alberto have been using DAX since 2010, wrote several books containing several chapters about DAX and we know that there is ...

Spring is coming and we published many dates of SSAS Tabular Workshops around Europe and online. Alberto Ferrari is coming to Aarhus, Denmark, for a 2-day SSAS Tabular Workshop on March 12-13, 2013 (you can see more info and register here). And Alberto will also deliver a free session in a community event on March 12 evening: the session is ...

This year is going to end, Maya failed their predictions and while this is bad for predictive industry, it’s also good for all of us! We’ve seen many news in Microsoft BI stack: Excel 2013 has been RTM’d – its General Availability is expected in early 2013 but many early adopters are already using it daily (myself included) PowerPivot and ...

Today at PASS Summit 2012 there have been several announcements during the keynote. Moreover, other news have not been highlighted in the keynote but are equally if not more important for the BI community. Let’s start from the big news in the keynote (other details on SQL Server Blog): Hekaton: this is the codename for in-memory OLTP ...

Next week I and Alberto Ferrari will be in Seattle at PASS Summit 2012. You can meet us at our sessions, at a book signing and hopefully watching some other session during the conference. Here are our appointments: Thursday, November 08, 2012, 10:15 AM - 11:45 AM – Alberto Ferrari – Room 606-607 Querying and Optimizing DAX (BIA-321-S) ...

Short version: the latest available version of MDX Studio can be downloaded from http://www.sqlbi.com/tools/mdx-studio/ Long version: Last week Stacia Misner twitted that the online version of MDX Studio was no longer available. It was hosted on http://mdx.mosha.com. It was a sad news, and it is also not good that nobody is maintaining the ...

Short update about community events in Europe where I will speak. On October 11 I will present DAX in Action in Köln - all details in the PASS local chapter here: http://www.sqlpass.de/Regionen/Deutschland/K%C3%B6lnBonnD%C3%BCsseldorf.aspx I will be speaking at a community event in Copenhagen on November 21, 2012. The session will be Excel 2013 ...

I recently came in a problem trying to improve the parallelism of Tabular processing. As you know, multiple tables can be processed in parallel, whereas the processing of several partitions within the same table cannot be parallelized. When you perform an incremental update by adding only new rows to existing table, what you really do is adding ...

If you started using DAX as a query language, you might have encountered some performance issues by using SUMMARIZE. The problem is related to the calculation you put in the SUMMARIZE, by adding what are called extension columns, which compute their value within a filter context defined by the rows considered in the group that the SUMMARIZE uses ...