In DAX you don’t have the LIKE operator and you have to use SEARCH instead. However, performance are not very good and it is better to use LEFT and RIGHT if you just need to compare the initial (or ending) match of a string. I just wrote an article about  Read more

I wrote a short article about query projection in DAX. To make the story short, you should always use SUMMARIZE in order to remove columns from a table in a query. Thus, if you just want three columns from a table, instead of writing this in SQL: SELECT  Read more

You should have already read that DAX is simpler than MDX. It’s true, and sometime you have to pay a price for simplicity. I am used to say that DAX is somewhere between SQL and MDX. In fact, SQL requires you to put any relationship in the query (using  Read more

Last week the final session evaluations from PASS Summit 2011 have been communicated to speakers and best scores have been made public. My session was not particularly good: it had very good feedback (overall average 4.32) and some average one, mostly  Read more

Just a breaking news: you can vote the sessions you’d like to attend at the next SQLbits in London! I already did my job and I have to say that it’s very hard to use your 10 sesssions – there are too many sessions that I’d like to watch!  Read more

I just published an article about Sorting Dates Columns in PowerPivot v2 and BISM Tabular on SQLBI website. In reality, the article is about sorting columns by other columns in a Tabular model, but the common scenario in which you need that is in a Calendar  Read more

If you missed this, it is finally possible to publish your data on Windows Azure Marketplace . The name DataMarket is no longer present here also because the marketplace also include applications and not only data, but the news introduced by the last  Read more

The video of the session Vertipaq vs OLAP: Change Your Data Modeling Approach that I delivered at SQLBits 9 is finally available! You can find here the video of sessions I and Alberto Ferrari delivered at the last two SQLBits. Last week we also submitted  Read more

After so many request we have finally arranged a PowerPivot Workshop online edition dedicated to America’s time zones! It is scheduled for December 19-20, 2012, with this schedule: US Eastern Time (EST): 10:00am-1:00pm / 2:00pm-5:00pm US Central Time  Read more

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  Read more