Tomorrow, at 11 AM CET, I will deliver a webinar on how to produce interesting reports with PowerPivot, a webcast which is a first taste of my incoming session for the European Sharepoint Conference. You can see all the details here: http://www.sharepointeurope.com/upcoming-webinars/self-service-bi-at-work,-an-example-of-a-powerful-user-created-report-in-powerpivot.aspx  Read more

A new date is available for the PowerPivot workshop I and Marco are delivering all over Europe. On September 19-20 , 2011 we will be in Lisbon (Portugal) to present the workshop to Excel users and BI professionals. Moreover, as Denali CTP3 of PowerPivot  Read more

Wow! Today I hit F5 on this interesting transaction: BEGIN TRANSACTION     INSERT INTO World.Babies (Name, Surname, DateOfBirth, Gender)     VALUES (‘Arianna’, ‘Ferrari’, ‘20110720’, ‘Female’);     UPDATE World.Parents  Read more

In my last post about Parent/Child hierarchies , there is a question, in the comments, that I found interesting. Nevertheless, the formula is a complex one and cannot be written in a simple comment. Thus, I am making a follow-up to that post. I am not  Read more

Some time ago, I wrote a post about how to handle Parent/Child hierarchies in PowerPivot 1.0. It was pretty intricate, because P/C are not handled natively in PowerPivot. Now, with the advent of Denali, Microsoft gave us all the functions needed to handle  Read more

Surfing on the web, here , I came into this intriguing question: How do we ask something like “Show me how many customers have an iPad but don’t have a book?” We are speaking about a sales analysis where the canonical entities are Customers, Products  Read more

Browsing on the web I have seen an interesting question that is worth a post, since I think it is a very common pattern and a good example of “thinking in DAX”. Starting from a table which contains a people and two dates (ActiveFrom, ActiveTo), we want  Read more

While it is well know that in UDM data should be loaded sorted, to get better file compression and map structures. The world of PowerPivot (and BISM) is yet not explored. Working with a 50 millions rows table, I tested various scenarios to check if sorting  Read more

I teach to my students always to remove all useless columns from PowerPivot data models, because they simply waste precious memory. While I was working on a test model with 50 millions of rows, I did the naive mistake of loading the complete table in  Read more

Yep… it’s me. :)  Read more