You know, selecting calculated members in Excel is not an option. I talked about this issue more than three years ago for the first time: http://sqlblog.com/blogs/marco_russo/archive/2007/01/31/excel-2007-pivottable-with-calculated-members.aspx http://sqlblog.com/blogs/marco_russo/archive/2007/03/07/ssas-2005-sp2-breaks-excel-calculated-member-selection.aspx  Read more

UPDATE 2017-07-12: please note this article was written in 2010, there are now better ways to obtain the same result. Please read these articles: Physical and Virtual Relationships in DAX and Propagate filters using TREATAS in DAX PowerPivot supports  Read more

A calculated column is a DAX expression which is evaluated when the PowerPivot workbook is updated. It is very useful, but there are cases where you want to delay calculation at query time. For example: You want to make part of the calculation depending  Read more

I recently talked about memory usage in PowerPivot and previously I wrote about difference modeling options using table normalization or not . Thus, I wondered whether table normalization is a good practice for performance and memory or not. The short  Read more

I started using SQL Search (a free product from RedGate) several weeks ago, while it was still in beta. Now that the product has been released and is freely downloadable, I can say it has being really useful since the first beta. My common need is to  Read more

Denny Lee described how to open a trace file in PowerPivot for Excel . It is something that is very important because the SSAS engine which runs PowerPivot runs inside the Excel process and doesn’t have an external connection (thus, also SQL Profiler  Read more

PowerPivot for Excel is an Add-In which uses a local version of Analysis Services (SSAS) to process data and make calculation to respond to user queries made using Excel 2010. The SSAS engine is loaded in-memory in the process of Excel. Especially with  Read more

The calculation for ABC analysis can be made in PowerPivot using calculated columns. In this way each row can have an attribute with the appropriate ABC class. The ABC calculation has to be made considering a particular grouping and sort order. For example,  Read more

Following the full disclosure of Grant Fritchey and Andy Leonard , here are my evaluations of PASS 2009 Summit evaluations (in both sessions I was on stage together with Alberto Ferrari). To make the post more readable, I anticipate the comments. The  Read more

I know, the title is provocative. It’s intentional. I’d like to get feedback about my opinion. My point is simple (but not so short!). PowerPivot (which, you know, I like) and self-service BI are the new buzzwords for BI in Redmond. However, there are  Read more