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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

One month ago I wrote about my sessions at PASS Business Analytics Conference 2013, in Chicago, IL on April 10-12, 2013. If you still have not registered, you can save $200 by using the code BAC228BL and you should hurry up, because there is another discount if you register within March 15, 2013. If you are too lazy to click on the previous post, ...

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 ...

Recently I had to write a DAX formula containing a LASTDATE within the logical condition of a FILTER: I found that its behavior was not the one I expected and I further investigated. At the end, I wrote my findings in this article on SQLBI, which can be applied to any Time Intelligence function with a <dates> argument. The key ...

Boyan Penev announced the availability of DateStream project on CodePlex: it is a data feed that can be consumed by PowerPivot but also to generate a calendar table for any type of usage. Yes, Analysis Services has a wizard, but when you are in a hurry why not simply consume a ready to go data source? In fact, this data feed is published for free ...

In PowerPivot you can import data from several sources and it is often the case that you import a DateTime column from a database. From an analytical point of view, you usually make analysis over dates (day/month/year/quarter/week) and over time (hour/minute) but to do that it is often useful to have two independent set of attributes: one for the ...

I've written here before about Data Education, the training company I recently launched, building off my previous company Boston SQL Training. Things have moved along quickly, and I and the rest of the Data Education staff are very happy to announce a jam-packed fall and winter course roster. We'll be announcing even more classes later in the ...

It’s Day 1 of #24HOP and it’s been great to participate in this event with so many women from all over the world in one long training-fest. The SQL community has been abuzz on Twitter with running commentary which is fun to watch while listening to the current speaker. If you missed the fun today because you’re busy with all that work you’ve got ...