After the first two editions of the SSAS Tabular Workshop, I and Alberto had some time to flush some of the pending activities. We published two articles:
- Clever Hierarchy Handling in DAX: DAX is not a hierarchy-friendly language, especially if you have a MDX background. If you have to implement hierarchy-based calculation, MDX is still better. But if you need to do that in DAX (for example, because you need this in a DAX measure), then you have to read this article written by Alberto Ferrari that explains how to correctly calculate the classical “ratio to parent” pattern in several different scenarios.
- Order of Evaluation in CALCULATE Parameters: a common mistake when you start working with DAX is understanding the evaluation order of CALCULATE parameters and what happens when you have nested CALCULATE statements. The topic can be very dense, so I tried to write a simple article that explain the basic concepts and based on the feedback I’ll receive, I’ll consider writing other articles on this subject. So feedback is welcome!
We have other ideas and material that I hope we’ll be able to write and publish in the upcoming weeks. In the meantime, there are plenty of other editions of the workshop this month, starting from the online one next week that is arranged for US time zone. Don’t miss it!
Context transition
Evaluates an expression in a context modified by filters.
CALCULATE ( <Expression> [, <Filter> [, <Filter> [, … ] ] ] )