I will be in Amsterdam for the Advanced DAX Workshop on March 17-19, 2014 (hint: there are still a few seats available if you want to do a last-minute registration), and the evening of March 18 I will speak at a PASS Nederland UG meeting (between 18:30 and 21:00) that you can attend for free by registering here.
Here are the two topics I will present at the UG meeting, in two relatively short 45 minutes sessions:
DAX Patterns
Do you know that great feeling when you are struggling to find a formula, spend hours writing non-sense calculations until a light turns into your brain, your fingers move rapidly on the keyboard and, after a quick debug, DAX starts to compute exactly what you wanted? This session shows some of these scenarios spending some time looking at the pattern of each one, discussing the formula and its challenge and, at the end, writing the formula. Scenarios include custom calendars, budget patterns and related distinct count. A medium knowledge of the DAX language will let you get the best out of the session.
DAX from the Field: Real-World Case Studies
In this session, we will dive into lessons from the field, where real customers are using DAX to solve complex problems well beyond the Adventure Works scenarios. How do you make a database fit in memory if it doesn’t fit? How do you handle billions of rows with a complex calculation? What tools can you use to benchmark and choose the right hardware? How do you scale up performance on both small and large databases? What are the common mistakes in DAX formulas that might cause performance bottlenecks? These are just a few questions we will answer by looking at best practices that are working for real customers. In this session, you will learn efficient DAX solutions and how far you can push the limits of the system.