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• Donald Farmer left Microsoft for QlikView

  - by Marco Russo (SQLBI)

  As many of you probably already know, Donald Farmer left Microsoft to join QlikView . There are no doubts that Donald have been “the face of Microsoft BI” in the last years. This news has been initially perceived (me included, I admit) as a possible lack of confidence in Microsoft BI Vision, but after reading his blog and many other comments from Microsoft people, I can say it is not. This is more a personal choice, looking for a new challenge in a brilliant career in a relatively smaller environment...(read more)

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• New training on Power Pivot with recorded video courses

  - by Marco Russo (SQLBI)

  I and Alberto Ferrari started delivering training on Power Pivot in 2010, initially in classrooms and then also online. We also recorded videos for Project Botticelli, where you can find content about Microsoft tools and services for Business Intelligence. In the last months, we produced a recorded video course for people that want to learn Power Pivot without attending a scheduled course. We split the entire Power Pivot course training in three editions, offering at a lower price the more introductive modules: Beginner: introduces Power Pivot to any user who knows Excel and want to create reports with more complex and large data structures than a single table. Intermediate: improves skills on Power Pivot for Excel, introducing the DAX language and important features such as CALCULATE and Time Intelligence functions. Advanced: includes a depth coverage of the DAX language, which is required for writing complex calculations, and other advanced features of both Excel and Power Pivot. There are also two bundles, that includes two or three editions at a lower price. Most important, we have a special 40% launch discount on all published video courses using the coupon SQLBI-FRNDS-14 valid until August 31, 2014. Just follow the link to see a more complete description of the editions available and their discounted prices. Regular prices start at $29, which means that you can start a training with less than $18 using the special promotion. P.S.: we recently launched a new responsive version of the SQLBI web site, and now we also have a page dedicated to all videos available about our sessions in conferences around the world. You can find more than 30 hours of free videos here: http://www.sqlbi.com/tv.

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• DIVIDE vs division operator in #dax

  - by Marco Russo (SQLBI)

  Alberto Ferrari wrote an interesting article about DIVIDE performance in DAX. This new function has been introduced in SQL Server Analysis Services 2012 SP1, so it is available also in Excel 2013 (which still doesn’t have other features/fixes introduced by following Cumulative Updates…). The idea that instead of writing: IF ( Sales[Quantity] <> 0, Sales[Amount] / Sales[Quantity], BLANK () ) you can write: DIVIDE ( Sales[Amount], Sales[Quantity] ) There is a third optional argument in DIVIDE that defines the result in case the denominator (second argument) is zero, and by default its value is BLANK, so I omitted the third argument in my example. Using DIVIDE is very important, especially when you use a measure in MDX (for example in an Excel PivotTable) because it raise the chance that the non empty evaluation for the result is evaluated in bulk mode instead of cell-by-cell. However, from a DAX point of view, you might find it’s better to use the standard division operator removing the IF statement. I suggest you to read Alberto’s article, because you will find that an expression applying a filter using FILTER is faster than using CALCULATE, which is against any rule of thumb you might have read until now! Again, this is not always true, and depends on many conditions – trying to simplify, we might say that for a simple calculation, the query plan generated by FILTER could be more efficient – but, as usual, it depends, and 90% of the times using FILTER instead of CALCULATE produces slower performance. Do not take anything for granted, and always check the query plan when performance are your first issue!

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• A new SQL, a new Analysis Services, a new Workshop! #ssas #sql2012

  - by Marco Russo (SQLBI)

  One week ago Microsoft SQL Server 2012 finally debuted with a virtual launch event and you can find many intro sessions there (20 minutes each). There is a lot of new content available if you want to learn more about SQL 2012 and in this blog post I’d like to provide a few link to sessions, documents, bits and courses that are available now or very soon. First of all, the release of Analysis Services 2012 has finally released PowerPivot 2012 (many of us called it PowerPivot v2 before this official name) and also the new Data Mining Add-in for Microsoft Office 2010, now available also for Excel 64bit! And, of course, don’t miss the Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Feature Pack, there are a lot of upgrades for both DBAs and developers. I just discovered there is a new LocalDB version of SQL Express that can run in user mode without any setup. Is this the end of SQL CE? But now, back to Analysis Services: if you want some tutorial on Tabular, the Microsoft Virtual Academy has a whole track dedicated to Analysis Services 2012 but you will probably be interested also in the one about Reporting Services 2012. If you think that virtual is good but it’s not enough, there are plenty of conferences in the coming months – these are just those where I and Alberto will deliver some SSAS Tabular presentations: SQLBits X, London, March 29-31, 2012: if you are in London or want a good reason to go, this is the most important SQL Server event in Europe this year, no doubts about it. And not only because of the high number of attendees, but also because there is an impressive number of speakers (excluding me, of course) coming from all over the world. This is an event second only to PASS Summit in Seattle so there are no good reasons to not attend it. Microsoft SQL Server & Business Intelligence Conference 2012, Milan, March 28-29, 2012: this is an Italian conference so the language might be a barrier, but many of us also speak English and the food is good! Just a few seats still available. TechEd North America, Orlando, June 11-14, 2012: you know, this is a big event and it contains everything – if you want to spend a whole day learning the SSAS Tabular model with me and Alberto, don’t miss our pre-conference day “Using BISM Tabular in Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services 2012” (be careful, it is on June 10, a nice study-Sunday!). TechEd Europe, Amsterdam, June 26-29, 2012: the European version of TechEd provides almost the same content and you don’t have to go overseas. We also run the same pre-conference day “Using BISM Tabular in Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services 2012” (in this case, it is on June 25, that’s a regular Monday). I and Alberto will also speak at some user group meeting around Europe during… well, we’re going to travel a lot in the next months. In fact, if you want to get a complete training on SSAS Tabular, you should spend two days with us in one of our SSAS Tabular Workshop! We prepared a 2-day seminar, a very intense one, that start from the simple tabular modeling and cover architecture, DAX, query, advanced modeling, security, deployment, optimization, monitoring, relationships with PowerPivot and Multidimensional… Really, there are a lot of stuffs here! We announced the first dates in Europe and also an online edition optimized for America’s time zone: Apr 16-17, 2012 – Amsterdam, Netherlands Apr 26-27, 2012 – Copenhagen, Denmark May 7-8, 2012 – Online for America’s time zone May 14-15, 2012 – Brussels, Belgium May 21-22, 2012 – Oslo, Norway May 24-25, 2012 – Stockholm, Sweden May 28-29, 2012 – London, United Kingdom May 31-Jun 1, 2012 – Milan, Italy (Italian language) Also Chris Webb will join us in this workshop and in every date you can find who is the speaker on the web site. The course is based on our upcoming book, almost 600 pages (!) about SSAS Tabular, an incredible effort that will be available very soon in a preview (rough cuts from O’Reilly) and will be on the shelf in May. I will provide a link to order it as soon as we have one! And if you think that this is not enough… you’re right! Do you know what is the only thing you can do to optimize your Tabular model? Optimize your DAX code. Learning DAX is easy, mastering DAX requires some knowledge… and our DAX Advanced Workshop will provide exactly the required content. Public classes will be available later this year, by now we just deliver it on demand.

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• SSAS Maestro Training in July 2012 #ssasmaestro #ssas

  - by Marco Russo (SQLBI)

  A few hours ago Chris Webb blogged about SSAS Maestro and I’d like to propagate the news, adding also some background info. SSAS Maestro is the premier certification on Analysis Services that selects the best experts in Analysis Services around the world. In 2011 Microsoft organized two rounds of training/exams for SSAS Maestros and up to now only 11 people from the first wave have been announced – around 10% of attendees of the course! In the next few days the new Maestros from the second round should be announced and this long process is caused by many factors that I’m going to explain. First, the course is just a step in the process. Before the course you receive a list of topics to study, including the slides of the course. During the course, students receive a lot of information that might not have been included in the slides and the best part of the course is class interaction. Students are expected to bring their experience to the table and comparing case studies, experiences and having long debates is an important part of the learning process. And it is also a part of the evaluation: good questions might be also more important than good answers! Finally, after the course, students have their homework and this may require one or two months to be completed. After that, a long (very long) evaluation process begins, taking into account homework, labs, participation… And for this reason the final evaluation may arrive months later after the course. We are going to improve and shorten this process with the next courses. The first wave of SSAS Maestro had been made by invitation only and now the program is opening, requiring a fee to participate in order to cover the cost of preparation, training and exam. The number of attendees will be limited and candidates will have to send their CV in order to be admitted to the course. Only experienced Analysis Services developers will be able to participate to this challenging program. So why you should do that? Well, only 10% of students passed the exam until now. So if you need 100% guarantee to pass the exam, you need to study a lot, before, during and after the course. But the course by itself is a precious opportunity to share experience, create networking and learn mission-critical enterprise-level best practices that it’s hard to find written on books. Oh, well, many existing white papers are a required reading *before* the course! The course is now 5 days long, and every day can be *very* long. We’ll have lectures and discussions in the morning and labs in the afternoon/evening. Plus some more lectures in one or two afternoons. A heavy part of the course is about performance optimization, capacity planning, monitoring. This edition will introduce also Tabular models, and don’t expect something you might find in the SSAS Tabular Workshop – only performance, scalability monitoring and optimization will be covered, knowing Analysis Services is a requirement just to be accepted! I and Chris Webb will be the teachers for this edition. The course is expensive. Applying for SSAS Maestro will cost around 7000€ plus taxes (reduced to 5000€ for students of a previous SSAS Maestro edition). And you will be locked in a training room for the large part of the week. So why you should do that? Well, as I said, this is a challenging course. You will not find the time to check your email – the content is just too much interesting to think you can be distracted by something else. Another good reason is that this course will take place in Italy. Well, the course will take place in the brand new Microsoft Innovation Campus, but in general we’ll be able to provide you hints to get great food and, if you are willing to attach one week-end to your trip, there are plenty of places to visit (and I’m not talking about the classic Rome-Florence-Venice) – you might really need to relax after such a week! Finally, the marking process after the course will be faster – we’d like to complete the evaluation within three months after the course, considering that 1-2 months might be required to complete the homework. If at this point you are not scared: registration will open in mid-April, but you can already write to [email protected] sending your CV/resume and a short description of your level of SSAS knowledge and experience. The selection process will start early and you may want to put your admission form on top of the FIFO queue!

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• A new SQL, a new Analysis Services, a new Workshop! #ssas #sql2012

  - by Marco Russo (SQLBI)

  One week ago Microsoft SQL Server 2012 finally debuted with a virtual launch event and you can find many intro sessions there (20 minutes each). There is a lot of new content available if you want to learn more about SQL 2012 and in this blog post I’d like to provide a few link to sessions, documents, bits and courses that are available now or very soon. First of all, the release of Analysis Services 2012 has finally released PowerPivot 2012 (many of us called it PowerPivot v2 before this official name) and also the new Data Mining Add-in for Microsoft Office 2010, now available also for Excel 64bit! And, of course, don’t miss the Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Feature Pack, there are a lot of upgrades for both DBAs and developers. I just discovered there is a new LocalDB version of SQL Express that can run in user mode without any setup. Is this the end of SQL CE? But now, back to Analysis Services: if you want some tutorial on Tabular, the Microsoft Virtual Academy has a whole track dedicated to Analysis Services 2012 but you will probably be interested also in the one about Reporting Services 2012. If you think that virtual is good but it’s not enough, there are plenty of conferences in the coming months – these are just those where I and Alberto will deliver some SSAS Tabular presentations: SQLBits X, London, March 29-31, 2012: if you are in London or want a good reason to go, this is the most important SQL Server event in Europe this year, no doubts about it. And not only because of the high number of attendees, but also because there is an impressive number of speakers (excluding me, of course) coming from all over the world. This is an event second only to PASS Summit in Seattle so there are no good reasons to not attend it. Microsoft SQL Server & Business Intelligence Conference 2012, Milan, March 28-29, 2012: this is an Italian conference so the language might be a barrier, but many of us also speak English and the food is good! Just a few seats still available. TechEd North America, Orlando, June 11-14, 2012: you know, this is a big event and it contains everything – if you want to spend a whole day learning the SSAS Tabular model with me and Alberto, don’t miss our pre-conference day “Using BISM Tabular in Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services 2012” (be careful, it is on June 10, a nice study-Sunday!). TechEd Europe, Amsterdam, June 26-29, 2012: the European version of TechEd provides almost the same content and you don’t have to go overseas. We also run the same pre-conference day “Using BISM Tabular in Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services 2012” (in this case, it is on June 25, that’s a regular Monday). I and Alberto will also speak at some user group meeting around Europe during… well, we’re going to travel a lot in the next months. In fact, if you want to get a complete training on SSAS Tabular, you should spend two days with us in one of our SSAS Tabular Workshop! We prepared a 2-day seminar, a very intense one, that start from the simple tabular modeling and cover architecture, DAX, query, advanced modeling, security, deployment, optimization, monitoring, relationships with PowerPivot and Multidimensional… Really, there are a lot of stuffs here! We announced the first dates in Europe and also an online edition optimized for America’s time zone: Apr 16-17, 2012 – Amsterdam, Netherlands Apr 26-27, 2012 – Copenhagen, Denmark May 7-8, 2012 – Online for America’s time zone May 14-15, 2012 – Brussels, Belgium May 21-22, 2012 – Oslo, Norway May 24-25, 2012 – Stockholm, Sweden May 28-29, 2012 – London, United Kingdom May 31-Jun 1, 2012 – Milan, Italy (Italian language) Also Chris Webb will join us in this workshop and in every date you can find who is the speaker on the web site. The course is based on our upcoming book, almost 600 pages (!) about SSAS Tabular, an incredible effort that will be available very soon in a preview (rough cuts from O’Reilly) and will be on the shelf in May. I will provide a link to order it as soon as we have one! And if you think that this is not enough… you’re right! Do you know what is the only thing you can do to optimize your Tabular model? Optimize your DAX code. Learning DAX is easy, mastering DAX requires some knowledge… and our DAX Advanced Workshop will provide exactly the required content. Public classes will be available later this year, by now we just deliver it on demand.

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• Watch @marcorus and @ferrarialberto sessions online #teched #msteched #tee2012

  - by Marco Russo (SQLBI)

  In June I participated to two TechEd editions (North America and Europe). I and Alberto delivered a Pre Conference and two sessions about Tabular. Both conferences provides recorded sessions freely available on Channel 9 so that you can compare which one has been delivered in the best way! If you have to choose between the two versions, consider that in North America we receive more questions during and after the session (still recording), increasing the interaction, whereas in Europe questions usually comes after the session finished (so no recording available). If you’re curious, watch both and let me know which version you prefer, especially for Multidimensional vs Tabular! BISM: Multidimensional vs. Tabular (TechEd North America 2012) BISM: Multidimensional vs. Tabular (TechEd Europe 2012) Many-to-Many Relationships in BISM Tabular (TechEd North America 2012) Many-to-Many Relationships in BISM Tabular (TechEd Europe 2012) If you are interested to learn SSAS Tabular, don’t miss the next SSAS Tabular Workshop online on September 3-4, 2012. We are also planning dates for another roadshow in Europe this fall and I’m happy to announce we’ll have two dates in Germany, too. More updates in the coming weeks.

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• Watch @marcorus and @ferrarialberto sessions online #teched #msteched #tee2012

  - by Marco Russo (SQLBI)

  In June I participated to two TechEd editions (North America and Europe). I and Alberto delivered a Pre Conference and two sessions about Tabular. Both conferences provides recorded sessions freely available on Channel 9 so that you can compare which one has been delivered in the best way! If you have to choose between the two versions, consider that in North America we receive more questions during and after the session (still recording), increasing the interaction, whereas in Europe questions usually comes after the session finished (so no recording available). If you’re curious, watch both and let me know which version you prefer, especially for Multidimensional vs Tabular! BISM: Multidimensional vs. Tabular (TechEd North America 2012) BISM: Multidimensional vs. Tabular (TechEd Europe 2012) Many-to-Many Relationships in BISM Tabular (TechEd North America 2012) Many-to-Many Relationships in BISM Tabular (TechEd Europe 2012) If you are interested to learn SSAS Tabular, don’t miss the next SSAS Tabular Workshop online on September 3-4, 2012. We are also planning dates for another roadshow in Europe this fall and I’m happy to announce we’ll have two dates in Germany, too. More updates in the coming weeks.

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• Attribute Overwriting in MDX

  - by Marco Russo (SQLBI)

  Jeffrey Wang wrote a great blog post about attribute overwriting in MDX that is very clear and full of helpful pictures to show what happens when you write an MDX statement that writes into your multidimensional space. This is very common in an MDX Script and if you tried to customize the DateTool solution you probably experienced how hard this concept can be. The point is not that MDX is hard, is that a model based on multiple hierarchies in a dimension (and each attribute is a hierarchy by default!)...(read more)

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• Last day of early bird for PowerPivot Workshop in Dublin #ppws

  - by Marco Russo (SQLBI)

  The early bird discount for the PowerPivot Workshop in Dublin will expire today, Friday 11 March. There is also an upcoming workshop in Copenhagen (March 21-22, 2011) and a PowerPivot workshop in Zurich on April 4-5, 2011. I and Alberto are preparing new material in these days: something will integrate the workshop, other will be useful useful for future blog posts. We are discovering many new areas where the Vertipaq engine is really interesting for doing jobs he was probably not tought for! More...(read more)

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• Microsoft PowerPivot for Excel 2010 – book coming in September

  - by Marco Russo (SQLBI)

  As you might already know, I and Alberto Ferrari are writing a book about PowerPivot 2010 for Excel. The official title is Microsoft PowerPivot for Excel 2010: Give Your Data Meaning and you can already order it on Amazon ! However, it will be published in September 2010, and it is reasonable considered we are still in writing mode… Well, before buying it, consider that we are writing the book for the “real user” of PowerPivot, who doesn’t have a knowledge of MDX, multidimensional databases, ETL,...(read more)

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• Learn more about MDX every day

  - by Marco Russo (SQLBI)

  I started learning MDX in 1999 and after so many years of using it and teaching it to other people, I still discover something new every day. Not only because I use it in strange ways (well, this doesn’t happen every day, at least!) but because there are other interesting information to read. Jeffrey Wang just published another interesting blog about data prefetching in MDX, which explains very well some strange behavior that sometime I observed in some customer cube. I never had a clear explanation...(read more)

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• New PowerPivot Workshop dates: Copenhagen, Dublin and Zurich

  - by Marco Russo (SQLBI)

  The PowerPivot Workshop roadshow will continue in Europe in March and April. Registrations are now open for the following new dates in Denmark, Ireland and Switzerland: Copenhagen : 21-22, March 2011 at the Radisson Blu Royal Hotel Dublin : 28-29, March 2011 at the Microsoft Ireland Building 3 Zurich : 4-5, April 2011 at Digicom Academy AG Each edition of this course about PowerPivot is really challenging and inspire us for further research. The recent blog post from Alberto about Slowly Changing...(read more)

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• Implement Budget Allocation in DAX for Power Pivot and Tabular #powerpivot #tabular #ssas #dax

  - by Marco Russo (SQLBI)

  Comparing sales and budget, or costs and budget, is a very common operation. However, it is often the case that you have different granularities for different tables containing budget and the data to compare with. There are two ways to do that: you can limit the comparison to the granularity that is common to the two tables, or you can allocate the budget where it’s not defined. For example, if you have a budget defined by quarter and category, you might want to allocate it by month and product. In this way, you will do the comparison as you had a more granular definition of the budget, without actually having to do the manual job of allocating data (usually in an Excel worksheet!). If you want to do budget allocation in DAX, you can use the Budget Patterns we published on DAX Patterns. If you come from and MDX/OLAP background, at first you might find it hard to solve the problem of not having attribute hierarchies that helps you in propagating the budget values to lower hierarchical levels. However, I think that once you get used to DAX, you will find the behavior very predictable and easy to “debug” also for more complex allocation formula. You just have to be careful in writing the DAX formula, but probably the pattern we wrote should help you designing the right data model, without creating physical relationships to the budget table! This pattern is also based on the Handling Different Granularities scenario I discussed a couple of weeks ago.

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• CUBEMEMBER and CUBEVALUE stop working after #PowerPivot upgrade to #Excel 2013

  - by Marco Russo (SQLBI)

  I found an issue upgrading an Excel workbook containing PowerPivot data from Excel 2010 to Excel 2013. All CUBEMEMBER and CUBEVALUE functions point to a cube name that has been changed between the two version – you have to no longer reference the PowerPivot Data name, replacing it with ThisWorkbookDataModel instead. I wrote an article describing the change that you have to manually make to these Excel formulas in this article on SQLBI web site.

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• SSAS Tabular Workshop online and other upcoming dates (and updates!) #ssas #tabular

  - by Marco Russo (SQLBI)

  After many conferences and travels, this summer I had some time to write and prepare new sessions for the next wave of conferences. In reality I am just doing that, even if I already restarted traveling for consulting and training. So expect new content about DAX and Tabular coming in the next months! Starting to see real customer adopting Tabular is showing many new challenges and there is still a lot to learn and to create. If you still didn’t started working on Tabular, well, you should. As I always say, as a BI developer you should be able to choose between Tabular and Multidimensional, and in order to do that you should know both of them! One thing that I don’t like very much about marketing is that “Tabular is simpler”, because it’s often translated in “Tabular is for simple projects” when this last statement is not true. Actually, I see a lot of good reasons to adopt Tabular in complex data models, especially in non-traditional scenarios. I know, this is because I love to understand what are the actual limits of a technology, and I’m learning that there is simple a lot of space of improvement also for Tabular. It’s already fast, but it could be faster! How can you start? Well, first of all, by reading our book. Then, by attending to our SSAS Tabular workshop. There is an online edition of the workshop on September 3-4, 2012 (hurry up if you want to register), and there are already several dates planned for the next months (and others will be added soon!). And, of course, by installing SQL Server 2012 and trying to create models over your databases. If you are too lazy, just start with PowerPivot. As soon as you start working with Tabular or PowerPivot, you will see that there is one important skill you need: learning DAX. In the next few days I should publish an article that I’m finishing these days about best practices using SUMMARIZE and ADDCOLUMNS. If only someone published this article one year ago, I would have saved many hours of my life. But, you know, flight manuals are written in blood… and someone has to write! Stay tuned.

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• White Paper on Analysis Services Tabular Large-scale Solution #ssas #tabular

  - by Marco Russo (SQLBI)

  Since the first beta of Analysis Services 2012, I worked with many companies designing and implementing solutions based on Analysis Services Tabular. I am glad that Microsoft published a white paper about a case-study using one of these scenarios: An Analysis Services Case Study: Using Tabular Models in a Large-scale Commercial Solution. Alberto Ferrari is the author of the white paper and many people contributed to it. The final result is a very technical document based on a case study, which provides a level of detail that I don’t see often in other case studies (which are usually more marketing-oriented). This white paper has the following structure: Requirements (data model, capacity planning, client tool) Options considered (SQL Server Columnstore Indexes, SSAS Multidimensional, SSAS Tabular) Data Model optimizations (memory compression, query performance, scalability) Partitioning and Processing strategy for near real-time latency Hardware selection (NUMA analysis, Azure VM tests) Scalability tests (estimation of maximum users per node) If you are in charge of evaluating Tabular as analytical engine, or if you have to design your solution based on Tabular, this white paper is a must read. But if you just want to increase your knowledge of Analysis Services, you will find a lot of useful technical information. That said, my favorite quote of the document is the following one, funny but true: […] After several trials, the clear winner was a video gaming machine that one guy on the team used at home. That computer outperformed any available server, running twice as fast as the server-class machines we had in house. At that point, it was clear that the criteria for choosing the server would have to be expanded a bit, simply because it would have been impossible to convince the boss to build a cluster of gaming machines and trust it to serve our customers.  But, honestly, if a business has the flexibility to buy gaming machines (assuming the machines can handle capacity) – do this. Owen Graupman, inContact I want to write a longer discussion about how companies are adopting Tabular in scenarios where it is the hidden engine of a more complex solution (and not the classical “BI system”), because it is more frequent than you might expect (and has several advantages over many alternative approaches).

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• #MDX in London and speculation about future books

  - by Marco Russo (SQLBI)

  Chris Webb, who wrote the Expert Cube Development with Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services book with me and Alberto , is preparing another Introduction to MDX course in London, this time from October 26th to 28th. It is now a three day course (previously it was two day) and you can find every other detail here . You might be wondering whether we are writing something else... well, we don't have plan to release a new edition of the Analysis Services book - after all, all the content of the...(read more)

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• Tips for adapting Date table to Power View forecasting #powerview #powerbi

  - by Marco Russo (SQLBI)

  During the keynote of the PASS Business Analytics Conference, Amir Netz presented the new forecasting capabilities in Power View for Office 365. I immediately tried the new feature (which was immediately available, a welcome surprise in a Microsoft announcement for a new release) and I had several issues trying to use existing data models. The forecasting has a few requirements that are not compatible with the “best practices” commonly used for a calendar table until this announcement. For example, if you have a Year-Month-Day hierarchy and you want to display a line chart aggregating data at the month level, you use a column containing month and year as a string (e.g. May 2014) sorted by a numeric column (such as 201405). Such a column cannot be used in the x-axis of a line chart for forecasting, because you need a date or numeric column. There are also other requirements and I wrote the article Prepare Data for Power View Forecasting in Power BI on SQLBI, describing how to create columns that can be used with the new forecasting capabilities in Power View for Office 365.

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• Optimize Many-to-Many with SUMMARIZE and Other Techniques

  - by Marco Russo (SQLBI)

  We are still in the early days of DAX and even if I have been using it since 2 years ago, there is still a lot to learn on that. One of the topics that historically interests me (and many of the readers here, probably) is the many-to-many relationships between dimensions in a dimensional data model. When I and Alberto wrote the The Many to Many Revolution 2.0 we discovered the SUMMARIZE based pattern very late in the whitepaper writing. It is very important for performance optimization and it should be always used. In the last month, Gerhard Brueckl also presented an approach based on cross table filtering behavior that simplify the syntax involved, even if it’s harder to explain how it works internally. I published a short article titled Optimize Many-to-Many Calculation in DAX with SUMMARIZE and Cross Table Filtering on SQLBI website just to provide a quick reference to the three patterns available. A further study is still required to compare performance between SUMMARIZE and Cross Table Filtering patterns. Up to now, I haven’t observed big differences between them, even if their execution plans might be not identical and this suggest me that depending on other conditions you might favor one over the other.

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• PivotViewer demo for photographers

  - by Marco Russo (SQLBI)

  I have a friend (Sandro Rizzetto) that is also a photographer. A good one, but his job is in IT. For these reasons, after reading some posts of mines, he built a PivotViewer page to navigate its photo database. You can drilldown by category, date, lens, focal, iso, shutter speed and many other parameters. The result is awesome and is visible here . If you are interested in technical details and comments about the meaning of the data, read his blog here (it is in Italian)....(read more)

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• Expert Cube Development book finally on Kindle!

  - by Marco Russo (SQLBI)

  The book Expert Cube Development with Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services is finally available on Kindle ! I received many requests for that and the last one just a couple of days ago from Greg Low in its useful review . I'm curious to see whether the sales of this book will continue also on Kindle. After 2 years this book is still continuing to sell as in the first months. The content is still fresh and will be good also with the next release of Analysis Services for developing multidimensional...(read more)

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• User Group meeting in Copenhagen for #powerpivot

  - by Marco Russo (SQLBI)

  The next Monday, March 21st, I will join a special event organized by the Danish SQL Server User Group , Excelbi.dk and the Swedish SQL Server User Group . The meeting will start at 18:00 at the Radisson Royal Blu in Copenhagen, and this is the topic we will discuss. PowerPivot / BISM and the future of a BI Solution The next version of Analysis Services will offer the BI Semantic Model (BISM) that is based on Vertipaq, the same engine that runs PowerPivot. DAX and PowerPivot have been created as...(read more)

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• Basket Analysis with #dax in #powerpivot and #ssas #tabular

  - by Marco Russo (SQLBI)

  A few days ago I published a new article on DAX Patterns web site describing how to implement Basket Analysis in DAX. This topic is a very classical one and is also covered in the many-to-many revolution white paper. It has been also discussed in several blog posts, listed here in historical order: Simple Basket Analysis in DAX by Chris Webb PowerPivot, basket analysis and the hidden many to many by Alberto Ferrari Applied Basket Analysis in Power Pivot using DAX by Gerhard Brueckl As usual, in DAX Patterns we try to present the required DAX formulas in a way that is easy to adapt to specific models. We also try to show a good implementation from a performance point of view. Further optimizations are always possible in DAX. However, in order to keep the model simple to adapt in different scenarios, we avoid presenting optimizations that would require particular assumptions or restrictions on the data model. I hope you will find the Basket Analysis pattern useful. Even if you do not need it today, reading the DAX formula is a good exercise to check your knowledge of evaluation contexts in DAX. For example, describing how does it work the following expression is not a trivial task! [Orders with Both Products] := CALCULATE (     DISTINCTCOUNT ( Sales[SalesOrderNumber] ),     CALCULATETABLE (         SUMMARIZE ( Sales, Sales[SalesOrderNumber] ),         ALL ( Product ),         USERELATIONSHIP ( Sales[ProductCode], 'Filter Product'[Filter ProductCode] )     ) ) The good news is that you can use the patterns even if you do not really understand all the details of the DAX formulas you are using! Any feedback on this new pattern is very welcome.

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• #DAX Query Plan in SQL Server 2012 #Tabular

  - by Marco Russo (SQLBI)

  The SQL Server Profiler provides you many information regarding the internal behavior of DAX queries sent to a BISM Tabular model. Similar to MDX, also in DAX there is a Formula Engine (FE) and a Storage Engine (SE). The SE is usually handled by Vertipaq (unless you are using DirectQuery mode) and Vertipaq SE Query classes of events gives you a SQL-like syntax that represents the query sent to the storage engine. Another interesting class of events is the DAX Query Plan , which contains a couple...(read more)

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