This is one of the few non-technical posts of this blog. Just skip it if you want to quickly come back to 100% BI related topics. Last Saturday we run the SQL Saturday 454 in Turin . I was part of the organization, and actually I was one of the promoters  Read more

In the September release of Power BI Desktop, Microsoft introduced a new important feature: calculated tables. Chris Webb wrote a quick introduction to this feature, and Jason Thomas published a longer post about when to use calculated tables . The reason  Read more

Today (September 30, 2015) is the last day to submit an entry in the Power BI Best Visual contest . I and Daniele Perilli (who has the skills to design and implement UI) spent hours thinking about something that would have been challenging and useful  Read more

If you use SSAS Tabular, this is a very important news! Microsoft released a very important update for Analysis Services 2012 that provides performance improvements to pivot tables connected to an Analysis Services Tabular model: it is SQL Server 2012  Read more

Almost 3 years ago I wrote an article with the rules for DAX code formatting . If you quickly look at the article, you might think that it is all about readability of the code, and this is fundamentally true. But there two rules that have a particular  Read more

The growing adoption of Power BI Desktop is gathering new users of the DAX language. At the same time, there are a few new features, such as bidirectional filter propagation, that introduce new concepts to existing knowledge. For this reason, in the last  Read more

The August 2015 update of Power BI Desktop added two important features for existing Excel and Analysis Services users: Import Excel Power BI artifacts (Data Model, Queries, Power View) into a new Power BI Desktop file Live Analysis Services Connections  Read more

After many years of helping several companies around the world creating small and large data models using SQL Server Analysis Services Tabular, I’ve seen a common performance issue that is underestimated at design time. The VertiPaq engine in SSAS Tabular  Read more

If you use DAX, you should try DAX Formatter . Now it supports all the new functions introduced in Power BI Desktop and in Excel 2016. There are more than 70 new functions, even if half of them corresponds to Excel functions with the same name (see the  Read more

This is a blog post completely unrelated to the technical content I’m used to cover. But I’ve been asked so many times how I do handle my mail that I thought having a blog post will save me time to explain. So, if you are not interested, wait for the  Read more