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Search found 16 results on 1 pages for 'albertoferrari'.

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• Visio Forward Engineer Addin for Office 2010

  - by AlbertoFerrari

  Most of my database model are written with Visio. I don’t want to start a digression whether Visio is good or not to build a simple data model: Visio is enogh for my modeling needs and customers love its colours and the ability to open the model with Office when I need to discuss it with them. When I have finished modeling, I generate the database and everything works fine. Nevertheless, Microsoft seems not to like the forward engineer capabilities of Visio. The last release that supports forward...(read more)

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• PowerPivot and Parent/Child hierarchies

  - by AlbertoFerrari

  Does PowerPivot handle Parent/Child hierarchies? The common answer is “no”, since it does not handle them natively. During last PowerPivot course in London, I have been asked the same question once more and had an interesting discussion about this severe limitation of the PowerPivot data modeling and visualization capabilities. On my way back in Italy, I started thinking at a possible solution and, after some work, I managed to make PowerPivot handle Parent/Child hierarchies in a very nice way, which...(read more)

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• PowerPivot and the Slowly Changing Dimensions

  - by AlbertoFerrari

  Slowly changing dimensions are very common in the data warehouses and, basically, they store many versions of the same entity whenever a change happens in the columns for which history needs to be maintained. For example, the AdventureWorks data warehouse has a type 2 SCD in the DimProduct table. It can be easily checked for the product code “FR-M94S-38” which shows three different versions of itself, with changing product cost and list price. This is exactly what we can expect to find in any data...(read more)

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• PowerPivot and the Slowly Changing Dimensions

  - by AlbertoFerrari

  Slowly changing dimensions are very common in the data warehouses and, basically, they store many versions of the same entity whenever a change happens in the columns for which history needs to be maintained. For example, the AdventureWorks data warehouse has a type 2 SCD in the DimProduct table. It can be easily checked for the product code “FR-M94S-38” which shows three different versions of itself, with changing product cost and list price. This is exactly what we can expect to find in any data...(read more)

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• PowerPivot Workshop: new announcement and early bird expiring soon #ppws #PowerPivot

  - by AlbertoFerrari

  As always, I am a bit later than Marco in producing news. Nevertheless, I am very excited to tell you  the new date for the Frankfurt workshop on PowerPivot: February 21-22, 2011 . Save the date and find all the relevant information on www.powerpivotworkshop.com , where you can also register a seat for the workshop with the early bird rate. Moreover, the early bird for the London date is quickly approaching: it will expire on January, 17 ., Thus, hurry up and don’t miss the opportunity to save...(read more)

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• PowerPivot Workshop in London #ppws

  - by AlbertoFerrari

  As you might have read in Marco’s post , the PowerPivot Workshop I and Marco Russo have prepared is now starting its European tour. We will be in London on February 7,8 2011 and then touch most of the European countries during the next few months. We have provided the workshop first in Amsterdam and it has been a huge success, it is now time to start the roadshow and meet people who want to learn PowerPivot all over Europe: I am really excited about this! You will find updated information and workshop...(read more)

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• PowerPivot, Parent/Child and Unary Operators

  - by AlbertoFerrari

  Following my last post about parent/child hierarchies in PowerPivot, I worked a bit more to implement a very useful feature of Parent/Child hierarchies in SSAS which is obviously missing in PowerPivot, i.e. unary operators. A unary operator is simply the aggregation function that needs to be used to aggregate values of children over their parent. Unary operators are very useful in accountings where you might have incomes and expenses in the same hierarchy and, at the total level, you want to subtract...(read more)

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• Dynamic Ranking with Excel and PowerPivot

  - by AlbertoFerrari

  Ranking is useful and, in our book , I and Marco provide a lot of information about how to perform ranking with PowerPivot. Nevertheless, there is an interesting scenario where ranking can be performed without complex DAX formulas, but with just some creative Excel usage. I would like to describe it here. Let us start with some words about the scenario: we want to rank products based on sales in a year (e.g. 2002) and see how the top 10 of these products performed in the following or preceding years....(read more)

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• PowerPivot course: Copenhagen, Dublin and Zurich new dates available for booking

  - by AlbertoFerrari

  Wow, this time I have been able to make an announcement before Marco Russo! The PowerPivot course we are bringing in tour all over Europe has three new dates available for booking: Copenhagen : 21-22, March 2011 at the Radisson Blu Royal Hotel. Dublin : 28-29, March 2011 at the Microsoft Ireland Building 3. Zurich : 4-5, April 2011 at Digicom Academy AG. The registrations are now open on the www.powerpivotworkshop.com web site., where you can find all the relevant information about the course. As...(read more)

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• Thinking in DAX: Counting Products in the Current Status with PowerPivot

  - by AlbertoFerrari

  One of my readers came to me with an interesting formula to compute in PowerPivot. Even if I don’t normally post about very specific scenarios, I think this time it is interesting to write a blog post since the formula can be easily created, if you think at it in DAX, while it is very hard if you are still approaching it with an MDX or SQL mindset. Thinking in DAX is something that comes after a lot of formula authoring, something that all BI professionals should strive for, as Vertipaq in the new...(read more)

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• PowerPivot: editing measures when you reach 45

  - by AlbertoFerrari

  I have always been used to small fonts but now, as I am getting older, I’d better admit that a greater font is much more relaxing. Editing PowerPivot measures has always been a pain, since all you have available is a small text box and I hate to admit that I got used to leverage ZoomIt for a long time to edit measures. Today I ran into a great Windows feature that I did not know about: ctrl-wheel on the mouse inside a textbox increases the font size of the text box. It seems to work with most textboxes...(read more)

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• Microsoft BI Conference 2011 in Lisbon

  - by AlbertoFerrari

  Anyone interested in BI from Portugal or Spain should not miss the Microsoft BI Conference 2011 in Lisbon : one full day ( March, 25, 2011 ) with three tracks on Business Intelligence: Decision Makers BI pros Intro to BI. I am going to present two sessions on PowerPivot: one is a nice deep dive into DAX for BI pros, the other is about self service BI for decision makers. Titles and the complete agenda will be published in the next days, but I suggest to save the date. The full event is free and it...(read more)

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• New Whitepaper from SQLBI: Vertipaq vs ColumnStore

  - by AlbertoFerrari

  At the end of June 2012, I was in Amsterdam to present some sessions at Teched Europe 2012 and, while preparing the material for the demos (yes, the best demos are the ones I prepare at the last minute), I decided to make a comparison between the two implementations of xVelocity of SQL 2012, one is the VertiPaq engine in SSAS Tabular and the other one is the ColumnStore index in SQL Server. After some trials, I decided that ColumnStore was a clear loser, because I was not able to see a real improvement...(read more)

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• PowerPivot, Stocks Exchange and the Moving Average

  - by AlbertoFerrari

  In this post I want to analyze a data model that perform some basic computations over stocks and uses one of the most commonly needed formula there (and in many other business scenarios): a moving average over a specified period in time. Moving averages can be very easily modeled in PowerPivot, but there is the need for some care and, in this post, I try to provide a solid background on how to compute moving averages. In general, a moving average over period T1..T2 is the average of all the values...(read more)

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• PowerPivot: Putting two stocks on the same PivotChart

  - by AlbertoFerrari

  In a previous post , I have used a stock exchange scenario to speak about how to compute moving averages in a complex scenario. Playing with the same scenario, I felt the need to compare two stocks on the same chart, choosing the stock names with a slicer. As always, a picture is worth a thousand words, the final result I want to achieve is something like this, where I am comparing Microsoft over Apple during the last 10 years. It is clear that I am not going to comment in any way why traders seem...(read more)

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• PowerPivot: Putting two stocks on the same PivotChart

  - by AlbertoFerrari

  In a previous post , I have used a stock exchange scenario to speak about how to compute moving averages in a complex scenario. Playing with the same scenario, I felt the need to compare two stocks on the same chart, choosing the stock names with a slicer. As always, a picture is worth a thousand words, the final result I want to achieve is something like this, where I am comparing Microsoft over Apple during the last 10 years. It is clear that I am not going to comment in any way why traders seem...(read more)

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