One year after the release of SQL Server 2012 I see the growing demand for DAX. There are two reasons for that: an higher number of PowerPivot users started to build more complex data models, and SSAS Tabular is starting to be adopted by a larger number of companies, with and without a previous experience on former versions of Analysis ...

I’ve been interviewed by Greg Low in SQL Down Under show 58, and this is *not* an April fool! We talked for one hour about Tabular, Multidimensional, Data Warehouse and just a little bit about music (you can discover which music genre I’m used to listen…). You can hear this interview from the SQL Down Under Show 58 page (it is an MP3 format) and ...

If you are using Microsoft BI stack and you still didn’t start learning DAX, you should not wait any longer. One of the option you have is starting with one of our books, or you can also attend one of our workshop about Tabular or PowerPivot. But if you are planning to go to SQLBits or TechEd, you might also consider attending a full day about ...

I recently received a question about the memory required to run a Process Defrag on a Tabular model in Analysis Services. The Process Defrag is useful when you run incremental processing of a table frequently, or when some of the values in the dictionary are no longer used in the table, for example if you process the same partition ...

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, ...

There is a new whitepaper from Microsoft, Microsoft BI Authentication and Identity Delegation, which describes all the authentication and delegation scenarios with Microsoft BI technologies: Personal BI Scenarios (Excel) Team BI Scenarios (SharePoint) Corporate BI Scenarios (Reporting Services, Analysis Services) Federated BI ...

As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, I and Alberto are starting to travel again, delivering SSAS Tabular Workshop and other free community events around Europe. This is the updated list of our next dates, including community events: Online – SSAS Tabular Workshop on February 27-28, 2013 (17-24 CET) This workshop is delivered online – ...

I and Alberto Ferrari will speak at SQLBits XI (Nottingham, UK – May 2-4, 2013) and there are many good reasons to join us there, especially if you are interested to DAX! Here are our sessions: Thursday, 02 May 2013 – Training Day - From 0 to DAX The entire day is dedicated to learning DAX, starting from the syntax and going forward ...

DAX offers a set of Time Intelligence functions that simplify writing DAX expressions such as YTD, YOY and other time-related calculations. However, these functions only works when some assumptions are valid: your periods should be “natural” months and quarter. Some industries, such as retail and manufacturing, are used to accounting periods that ...

A common question I receive is about how to correctly size a server for an Analysis Services Tabular instance. I always answer that an analytical evaluation is partly an empiric process, because there are many variables involved and the simplest approach is building the database model on a development server and then performing some workload test ...