It is finally available the SSAS 2008 book I wrote with Chris Webb and Alberto Ferrari : Expert Cube Development with Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services . The book is also available on Amazon . You can also read a sample chapter for free. We  Read more

I recently encountered an issue using DRILLTHROUGH with ROLAP dimension and I wasn’t able to find any good information making searches about it, so I think it’s a good idea writing a few notes. Probably I will write a more complete on the DRILLTHROUGH  Read more

Even if the site still is not updated, the Microsoft BI Conference 2010 will be joined with TechEd 2010 in New Orleans, LA. The conference will start on June 7, 2010, with a pre-conference day on June 6 (there are still no updates about BI Conference  Read more

UPDATE: PowerPivot for Excel 2010 in SQL Server 2012 and Excel 2013 support the DISTINCTCOUNT aggregation in DAX. This blog post is relevant only if you use PowerPivot for Excel 2010 in SQL Server 2008 R2. A PivotTable based on PowerPivot data doesn’t  Read more

I just read what I think is the best analogy for PowerPivot so far – these are the words of Amir Netz in a discussion: A good analogy is the relationship between mainsteam media (newspapers and TV) and internet blogs. In the old days (7 years back…),  Read more

UPDATE: This blog post is still good for learning DAX principles, but a better description of many-to-many patterns is available on The Many-to-Many Revolution whitepaper that is available here: http://www.sqlbi.com/articles/many2many/ – please download  Read more

In the last few days Alberto wrote two very interesting posts: Remote Execution of SSIS Packages – this is something that many many people asked me since 2005. Now there is the complete code with the solution to this issue. Considering that SSIS 2008  Read more

During a conversation I expressed the idea of making a DSLs to model cubes by leveraging the “Oslo” platform – my needs was having a human readable source file, easy to compare if you have two versions of the same entity (cube, dimension, or something  Read more

I’ve been so busy in the last weeks that I wasn’t able to blog about PASS Summit 2009, so here’s a short recap. I and Alberto presented the SQLBI Methodology in a 75 minutes slot. The room was full, there were about 200 people and no sits available. We  Read more

The project codenamed Gemini has an official name now: PowerPivot . The complete name should be “PowerPivot for Excel 2010”, but PowerPivot is simpler. I didn’t like that name yesterday, but today it seems better. Microsoft announced this name at the  Read more