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• Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Analysis Services – The BISM Tabular Model #ssas #tabular #bism

  - by Marco Russo (SQLBI)

  I, Alberto and Chris spent many months (many nights, holidays and also working days of the last months) writing the book we would have liked to read when we started working with Analysis Services Tabular. A book that explains how to use Tabular, how to model data with Tabular, how Tabular internally works and how to optimize a Tabular model. All those things you need to start on a real project in order to make an happy customer. You know, we’re all consultants after all, so customer satisfaction is really important to be paid for our job! Now the book writing is finished, we’re in the final stage of editing and reviews and we look forward to get our print copy. Its title is very long: Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Analysis Services – The BISM Tabular Model. But the important thing is that you can already (pre)order it. This is the list of chapters: 01. BISM Architecture 02. Guided Tour on Tabular 03. Loading Data Inside Tabular 04. DAX Basics 05. Understanding Evaluation Contexts 06. Querying Tabular 07. DAX Advanced 08. Understanding Time Intelligence in DAX 09. Vertipaq Engine 10. Using Tabular Hierarchies 11. Data modeling in Tabular 12. Using Advanced Tabular Relationships 13. Tabular Presentation Layer 14. Tabular and PowerPivot for Excel 15. Tabular Security 16. Interfacing with Tabular 17. Tabular Deployment 18. Optimization and Monitoring And this is the book cover – have a good read!

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• DATE function does not support all the dates in DAX by design #powerpivot #tabular #dax

  - by Marco Russo (SQLBI)

  The DATE function in DAX has this simple syntax: DATE( <year>, <month>, <day> ) If you are like me, you never read the BOL notes that says in a clear way that it supports dates beginning with March 1, 1900. In fact, I was wrongly assuming that it would have supported any date that can be represented in a Date data type in Data Models, so all the dates beginning with January 1, 1900. The funny thing is that in some of the BOL documentation you will find that Date data type supports dates after March 1, 1900 (which seems not including that date, but this is a detail…). But we should not digress. The real issue is that if you try to call the DATE function passing values between January 1 and February 28, 1900, you will see a different day as a result. evaluate row ( "x", DATE( 1900, 1, 1 ) ) -- return WRONG result -- [x] 12/31/1899 12:00:00 AM   evaluate row ( "x", DATE( 1901, 2, 29 ) ) -- return WRONG result -- [x] 2/28/1900 12:00:00 AM   evaluate row ( "x", DATE( 1900, 3, 1 ) ) -- return CORRECT result -- [x] 3/1/1900 12:00:00 AM As usual, this is not a bug. It is “by design”. The DATE function works in this way in Excel. And also in Excel it was “by design”. In this case the design is having the same bug of Lotus 1-2-3 that handled 1900 a leap year, even though it isn’t. The first release of Lotus 1-2-3 is dated 1983. I hope many of my readers are younger than that. I tried to open a bug in Connect. Please vote it. I would like if Microsoft changed this type of items from “by design” (as we can expect) to “by genetic disease”. Or by “historical respect”, in order to be more politically correct.

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• #PowerPivot Workshop Online for America’s Time Zones #ppws

  - by Marco Russo (SQLBI)

  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 (CST): 9:00am-12:00pm / 1:00pm-4:00pm US Pacific Time (PST): 7:00am-10:00am / 11:00am-1:00pm Bogotá (Colombia): 10:00am-1:00pm / 2:00pm-5:00pm São Paulo (Brazil): 1:00pm-4:00pm / 5:00pm-8:00pm Buenos Aires (Argentina): 12:00pm-3:00pm / 4:00pm-7:00pm...(read more)

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• xVelocity engines compared: VertiPaq vs ColumnStore #ssas #vertipaq #xvelocity #sql #tabular

  - by Marco Russo (SQLBI)

  During the last months I and Alberto worked in several projects using Analysis Services Tabular and we had to face real world issues, such as complex queries, large data volume, frequent data updates and so on. Sometime we faced the challenge of comparing Tabular performance with SQL Server. It seemed a non-sense, because even if the same core xVelocity technology is implemented in both products (SQL Server 2012 uses ColumnStore indexes, whereas Analysis Services 2012 uses VertiPaq), we initially assumed that the better optimization for the in-memory engine used by Analysis Services would have been always better than SQL Server. However, we discovered several important things: Processing time might be different and having data on SQL Server could make ColumnStore way faster for processing. Partitioning in SQL Server might be much more effective for query performance than Analysis Services. A single query can scale easily on more processor on SQL Server, whereas in Analysis Services the formula engine is single-threaded and could be a bottleneck for certain queries. In case of a large workload with many concurrent users, storage engine cache in Analysis Services could be a big advantage over SQL Server, especially for scalability As you can see, these considerations are not always obvious and you might be tempted to make other assumptions based on these information. Well, don’t do that. Before anything else, read the whitepaper VertiPaq vs ColumnStore Comparison written by Alberto Ferrari. Then, measure your workload. Finally, make some conclusion. But don’t make too many assumptions. You might be wrong, as we did at the beginning of this journey.

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• Converting #MDX to #DAX and PowerPivot Workshop online #ppws

  - by Marco Russo (SQLBI)

  I just published the article Converting MDX to DAX – First Steps on the renewed SQLBI web site about converting MDX to DAX. The reason is that with BISM Tabular in Analysis Services 2012 you will be able to write queries in both DAX and MDX. If you already know MDX, you might wonder how to “translate” your MDX knowledge in DAX. I think that this is another way you can improve your knowledge about DAX: it has different concepts behind and this comparison should be helpful in this purpose. This is...(read more)

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• New licensing for SQL Server 2012 and #BISM #Tabular usage

  - by Marco Russo (SQLBI)

  Last week Microsoft announced a new licensing schema for SQL Server 2012. If you are interested in an extensive discussion of the new licensing scheme, Denny Cherry wrote a great blog post about that. I’d like to comment about the new BI Edition license. Teo Lachev already commented about the numbers and I agree with him. I generally like the new licensing mode of SQL 2012. It maintains a very low-entry barrier for SSRS/SSAS/SSIS (Standard Edition). It has a reasonable licensing schema for 20-50...(read more)

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• ASSIMP in my program is much slower to import than ASSIMP view program

  - by Marco

  The problem is really simple: if I try to load with the function aiImportFileExWithProperties a big model in my software (around 200.000 vertices), it takes more than one minute. If I try to load the very same model with ASSIMP view, it takes 2 seconds. For this comparison, both my software and Assimp view are using the dll version of the library at 64 bit, compiled by myself (Assimp64.dll). This is the relevant piece of code in my software // default pp steps unsigned int ppsteps = aiProcess_CalcTangentSpace | // calculate tangents and bitangents if possible aiProcess_JoinIdenticalVertices | // join identical vertices/ optimize indexing aiProcess_ValidateDataStructure | // perform a full validation of the loader's output aiProcess_ImproveCacheLocality | // improve the cache locality of the output vertices aiProcess_RemoveRedundantMaterials | // remove redundant materials aiProcess_FindDegenerates | // remove degenerated polygons from the import aiProcess_FindInvalidData | // detect invalid model data, such as invalid normal vectors aiProcess_GenUVCoords | // convert spherical, cylindrical, box and planar mapping to proper UVs aiProcess_TransformUVCoords | // preprocess UV transformations (scaling, translation ...) aiProcess_FindInstances | // search for instanced meshes and remove them by references to one master aiProcess_LimitBoneWeights | // limit bone weights to 4 per vertex aiProcess_OptimizeMeshes | // join small meshes, if possible; aiProcess_SplitByBoneCount | // split meshes with too many bones. Necessary for our (limited) hardware skinning shader 0; cout << "Loading " << pFile << "... "; aiPropertyStore* props = aiCreatePropertyStore(); aiSetImportPropertyInteger(props,AI_CONFIG_IMPORT_TER_MAKE_UVS,1); aiSetImportPropertyFloat(props,AI_CONFIG_PP_GSN_MAX_SMOOTHING_ANGLE,80.f); aiSetImportPropertyInteger(props,AI_CONFIG_PP_SBP_REMOVE, aiPrimitiveType_LINE | aiPrimitiveType_POINT); aiSetImportPropertyInteger(props,AI_CONFIG_GLOB_MEASURE_TIME,1); //aiSetImportPropertyInteger(props,AI_CONFIG_PP_PTV_KEEP_HIERARCHY,1); // Call ASSIMPs C-API to load the file scene = (aiScene*)aiImportFileExWithProperties(pFile.c_str(), ppsteps | /* default pp steps */ aiProcess_GenSmoothNormals | // generate smooth normal vectors if not existing aiProcess_SplitLargeMeshes | // split large, unrenderable meshes into submeshes aiProcess_Triangulate | // triangulate polygons with more than 3 edges //aiProcess_ConvertToLeftHanded | // convert everything to D3D left handed space aiProcess_SortByPType | // make 'clean' meshes which consist of a single typ of primitives 0, NULL, props); aiReleasePropertyStore(props); if(!scene){ cout << aiGetErrorString() << endl; return 0; } this is the relevant piece of code in assimp view code // default pp steps unsigned int ppsteps = aiProcess_CalcTangentSpace | // calculate tangents and bitangents if possible aiProcess_JoinIdenticalVertices | // join identical vertices/ optimize indexing aiProcess_ValidateDataStructure | // perform a full validation of the loader's output aiProcess_ImproveCacheLocality | // improve the cache locality of the output vertices aiProcess_RemoveRedundantMaterials | // remove redundant materials aiProcess_FindDegenerates | // remove degenerated polygons from the import aiProcess_FindInvalidData | // detect invalid model data, such as invalid normal vectors aiProcess_GenUVCoords | // convert spherical, cylindrical, box and planar mapping to proper UVs aiProcess_TransformUVCoords | // preprocess UV transformations (scaling, translation ...) aiProcess_FindInstances | // search for instanced meshes and remove them by references to one master aiProcess_LimitBoneWeights | // limit bone weights to 4 per vertex aiProcess_OptimizeMeshes | // join small meshes, if possible; aiProcess_SplitByBoneCount | // split meshes with too many bones. Necessary for our (limited) hardware skinning shader 0; aiPropertyStore* props = aiCreatePropertyStore(); aiSetImportPropertyInteger(props,AI_CONFIG_IMPORT_TER_MAKE_UVS,1); aiSetImportPropertyFloat(props,AI_CONFIG_PP_GSN_MAX_SMOOTHING_ANGLE,g_smoothAngle); aiSetImportPropertyInteger(props,AI_CONFIG_PP_SBP_REMOVE,nopointslines ? aiPrimitiveType_LINE | aiPrimitiveType_POINT : 0 ); aiSetImportPropertyInteger(props,AI_CONFIG_GLOB_MEASURE_TIME,1); //aiSetImportPropertyInteger(props,AI_CONFIG_PP_PTV_KEEP_HIERARCHY,1); // Call ASSIMPs C-API to load the file g_pcAsset->pcScene = (aiScene*)aiImportFileExWithProperties(g_szFileName, ppsteps | /* configurable pp steps */ aiProcess_GenSmoothNormals | // generate smooth normal vectors if not existing aiProcess_SplitLargeMeshes | // split large, unrenderable meshes into submeshes aiProcess_Triangulate | // triangulate polygons with more than 3 edges aiProcess_ConvertToLeftHanded | // convert everything to D3D left handed space aiProcess_SortByPType | // make 'clean' meshes which consist of a single typ of primitives 0, NULL, props); aiReleasePropertyStore(props); As you can see the code is nearly identical because I copied from assimp view. What could be the reason for such a difference in performance? The two software are using the same dll Assimp64.dll (compiled in my computer with vc++ 2010 express) and the same function aiImportFileExWithProperties to load the model, so I assume that the actual code employed is the same. How is it possible that the function aiImportFileExWithProperties is 100 times slower when called by my sotware than when called by assimp view? What am I missing? I am not good with dll, dynamic and static libraries so I might be missing something obvious. ------------------------------ UPDATE I found out the reason why the code is going slower. Basically I was running my software with "Start debugging" in VC++ 2010 Express. If I run the code outside VC++ 2010 I get same performance of assimp view. However now I have a new question. Why does the dll perform slower in VC++ debugging? I compiled it in release mode without debugging information. Is there any way to have the dll go fast in debugmode i.e. not debugging the dll? Because I am interested in debugging only my own code, not the dll that I assume is already working fine. I do not want to wait 2 minutes every time I want to load my software to debug. Does this request make sense?

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• SSAS Maestro Training in July 2012 #ssasmaestro #ssas

  - by Marco Russo (SQLBI)

  A few hours ago Chris Webb blogged about SSAS Maestro and I’d like to propagate the news, adding also some background info. SSAS Maestro is the premier certification on Analysis Services that selects the best experts in Analysis Services around the world. In 2011 Microsoft organized two rounds of training/exams for SSAS Maestros and up to now only 11 people from the first wave have been announced – around 10% of attendees of the course! In the next few days the new Maestros from the second round should be announced and this long process is caused by many factors that I’m going to explain. First, the course is just a step in the process. Before the course you receive a list of topics to study, including the slides of the course. During the course, students receive a lot of information that might not have been included in the slides and the best part of the course is class interaction. Students are expected to bring their experience to the table and comparing case studies, experiences and having long debates is an important part of the learning process. And it is also a part of the evaluation: good questions might be also more important than good answers! Finally, after the course, students have their homework and this may require one or two months to be completed. After that, a long (very long) evaluation process begins, taking into account homework, labs, participation… And for this reason the final evaluation may arrive months later after the course. We are going to improve and shorten this process with the next courses. The first wave of SSAS Maestro had been made by invitation only and now the program is opening, requiring a fee to participate in order to cover the cost of preparation, training and exam. The number of attendees will be limited and candidates will have to send their CV in order to be admitted to the course. Only experienced Analysis Services developers will be able to participate to this challenging program. So why you should do that? Well, only 10% of students passed the exam until now. So if you need 100% guarantee to pass the exam, you need to study a lot, before, during and after the course. But the course by itself is a precious opportunity to share experience, create networking and learn mission-critical enterprise-level best practices that it’s hard to find written on books. Oh, well, many existing white papers are a required reading *before* the course! The course is now 5 days long, and every day can be *very* long. We’ll have lectures and discussions in the morning and labs in the afternoon/evening. Plus some more lectures in one or two afternoons. A heavy part of the course is about performance optimization, capacity planning, monitoring. This edition will introduce also Tabular models, and don’t expect something you might find in the SSAS Tabular Workshop – only performance, scalability monitoring and optimization will be covered, knowing Analysis Services is a requirement just to be accepted! I and Chris Webb will be the teachers for this edition. The course is expensive. Applying for SSAS Maestro will cost around 7000€ plus taxes (reduced to 5000€ for students of a previous SSAS Maestro edition). And you will be locked in a training room for the large part of the week. So why you should do that? Well, as I said, this is a challenging course. You will not find the time to check your email – the content is just too much interesting to think you can be distracted by something else. Another good reason is that this course will take place in Italy. Well, the course will take place in the brand new Microsoft Innovation Campus, but in general we’ll be able to provide you hints to get great food and, if you are willing to attach one week-end to your trip, there are plenty of places to visit (and I’m not talking about the classic Rome-Florence-Venice) – you might really need to relax after such a week! Finally, the marking process after the course will be faster – we’d like to complete the evaluation within three months after the course, considering that 1-2 months might be required to complete the homework. If at this point you are not scared: registration will open in mid-April, but you can already write to [email protected] sending your CV/resume and a short description of your level of SSAS knowledge and experience. The selection process will start early and you may want to put your admission form on top of the FIFO queue!

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• Image libraries sites to download pro images with no credits expiration policy

  - by Marco Demaio

  I found professional image libraries sites like http://www.istockphoto.com or http://www.dreamstime.com are quite useful to add some cool images to a website either when filling its contents or when designing its graphic layout. Unfortunately both of the site I listed above use credits plans that expires after 12 months: you buy credits (using real bucks) and then you can download images, but if you don't use all the credits within 1 year, thay suck them out from your virtual wallet (I think it's really unfair, but too bad for you, that's their policy). Do you know about other good image libraries sites (from your real life experience) that use credits to download images, but thay don't expire after 12 months? Obviously I won't ignore your suggestions about any other image libraries sites.

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• Donald Farmer left Microsoft for QlikView

  - by Marco Russo (SQLBI)

  As many of you probably already know, Donald Farmer left Microsoft to join QlikView . There are no doubts that Donald have been “the face of Microsoft BI” in the last years. This news has been initially perceived (me included, I admit) as a possible lack of confidence in Microsoft BI Vision, but after reading his blog and many other comments from Microsoft people, I can say it is not. This is more a personal choice, looking for a new challenge in a brilliant career in a relatively smaller environment...(read more)

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• Last day of early bird for PowerPivot Workshop in Dublin #ppws

  - by Marco Russo (SQLBI)

  The early bird discount for the PowerPivot Workshop in Dublin will expire today, Friday 11 March. There is also an upcoming workshop in Copenhagen (March 21-22, 2011) and a PowerPivot workshop in Zurich on April 4-5, 2011. I and Alberto are preparing new material in these days: something will integrate the workshop, other will be useful useful for future blog posts. We are discovering many new areas where the Vertipaq engine is really interesting for doing jobs he was probably not tought for! More...(read more)

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• Watch @marcorus and @ferrarialberto sessions online #teched #msteched #tee2012

  - by Marco Russo (SQLBI)

  In June I participated to two TechEd editions (North America and Europe). I and Alberto delivered a Pre Conference and two sessions about Tabular. Both conferences provides recorded sessions freely available on Channel 9 so that you can compare which one has been delivered in the best way! If you have to choose between the two versions, consider that in North America we receive more questions during and after the session (still recording), increasing the interaction, whereas in Europe questions usually comes after the session finished (so no recording available). If you’re curious, watch both and let me know which version you prefer, especially for Multidimensional vs Tabular! BISM: Multidimensional vs. Tabular (TechEd North America 2012) BISM: Multidimensional vs. Tabular (TechEd Europe 2012) Many-to-Many Relationships in BISM Tabular (TechEd North America 2012) Many-to-Many Relationships in BISM Tabular (TechEd Europe 2012) If you are interested to learn SSAS Tabular, don’t miss the next SSAS Tabular Workshop online on September 3-4, 2012. We are also planning dates for another roadshow in Europe this fall and I’m happy to announce we’ll have two dates in Germany, too. More updates in the coming weeks.

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• Contents farms, scrapers sites, aggregators real world examples? [closed]

  - by Marco Demaio

  Contents farm, scrappers, aggregators real world examples? Could you plz clarify me: efreedom.com is a scraper site, not a content farm? Because it simply copies and pastes contents from stackoverflow. ehow.com and squidoo.com are contents farm? They don't copy and paste contents they just generate fresh new user generated content, but too much and too quickly. expert-exchange.com is NOT a content farm or a scraper site, right?! It's simply that many people (an me too) hates it (they also wrote to Matt Cutts) because it shows up hight in Google providing a useless question with no answer. There are also many sites that act as 'contents aggregators in the form of specialized directories' (let's call them CASD), I don't know how to else define them. Do they have a specific definition? Anyway are these type of CASD contents farms or scrapers sites or what else? Basically these CASD search for all sites of the same type i.e. “restaurants websites”, they copy and paste the contents found in “Restaurant A” and create in their aggregator site a new page called “Restaurant A”, then they do the same for all websites of the same type, thus creating a sort of directory of restaurants. Later on these CASD also sends an email to the owner of “Restaurant A” (usually the email is on the website) with a user and password to let him modify/update its own page on the CASD site. Later on these CASD might ask for money to the owner of “Restaurant A” because they bring him traffic, otherwise they remove its page on the aggregator. Someone could call these simply directories, but I think a directory is different because is something you need to add your site into by filling a form and not something that steals contents from your existing site without a specific acceptance from the site's owner. I also really wonder how Google will sort out all these mess sites packed of contents that show up more and more and everywhere in search results.

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• Watch @marcorus and @ferrarialberto sessions online #teched #msteched #tee2012

  - by Marco Russo (SQLBI)

  In June I participated to two TechEd editions (North America and Europe). I and Alberto delivered a Pre Conference and two sessions about Tabular. Both conferences provides recorded sessions freely available on Channel 9 so that you can compare which one has been delivered in the best way! If you have to choose between the two versions, consider that in North America we receive more questions during and after the session (still recording), increasing the interaction, whereas in Europe questions usually comes after the session finished (so no recording available). If you’re curious, watch both and let me know which version you prefer, especially for Multidimensional vs Tabular! BISM: Multidimensional vs. Tabular (TechEd North America 2012) BISM: Multidimensional vs. Tabular (TechEd Europe 2012) Many-to-Many Relationships in BISM Tabular (TechEd North America 2012) Many-to-Many Relationships in BISM Tabular (TechEd Europe 2012) If you are interested to learn SSAS Tabular, don’t miss the next SSAS Tabular Workshop online on September 3-4, 2012. We are also planning dates for another roadshow in Europe this fall and I’m happy to announce we’ll have two dates in Germany, too. More updates in the coming weeks.

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• Attribute Overwriting in MDX

  - by Marco Russo (SQLBI)

  Jeffrey Wang wrote a great blog post about attribute overwriting in MDX that is very clear and full of helpful pictures to show what happens when you write an MDX statement that writes into your multidimensional space. This is very common in an MDX Script and if you tried to customize the DateTool solution you probably experienced how hard this concept can be. The point is not that MDX is hard, is that a model based on multiple hierarchies in a dimension (and each attribute is a hierarchy by default!)...(read more)

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• Microsoft PowerPivot for Excel 2010 – book coming in September

  - by Marco Russo (SQLBI)

  As you might already know, I and Alberto Ferrari are writing a book about PowerPivot 2010 for Excel. The official title is Microsoft PowerPivot for Excel 2010: Give Your Data Meaning and you can already order it on Amazon ! However, it will be published in September 2010, and it is reasonable considered we are still in writing mode… Well, before buying it, consider that we are writing the book for the “real user” of PowerPivot, who doesn’t have a knowledge of MDX, multidimensional databases, ETL,...(read more)

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• Learn more about MDX every day

  - by Marco Russo (SQLBI)

  I started learning MDX in 1999 and after so many years of using it and teaching it to other people, I still discover something new every day. Not only because I use it in strange ways (well, this doesn’t happen every day, at least!) but because there are other interesting information to read. Jeffrey Wang just published another interesting blog about data prefetching in MDX, which explains very well some strange behavior that sometime I observed in some customer cube. I never had a clear explanation...(read more)

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• New PowerPivot Workshop dates: Copenhagen, Dublin and Zurich

  - by Marco Russo (SQLBI)

  The PowerPivot Workshop roadshow will continue in Europe in March and April. Registrations are now open for the following new dates in Denmark, Ireland and Switzerland: 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 Each edition of this course about PowerPivot is really challenging and inspire us for further research. The recent blog post from Alberto about Slowly Changing...(read more)

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• A new SQL, a new Analysis Services, a new Workshop! #ssas #sql2012

  - by Marco Russo (SQLBI)

  One week ago Microsoft SQL Server 2012 finally debuted with a virtual launch event and you can find many intro sessions there (20 minutes each). There is a lot of new content available if you want to learn more about SQL 2012 and in this blog post I’d like to provide a few link to sessions, documents, bits and courses that are available now or very soon. First of all, the release of Analysis Services 2012 has finally released PowerPivot 2012 (many of us called it PowerPivot v2 before this official name) and also the new Data Mining Add-in for Microsoft Office 2010, now available also for Excel 64bit! And, of course, don’t miss the Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Feature Pack, there are a lot of upgrades for both DBAs and developers. I just discovered there is a new LocalDB version of SQL Express that can run in user mode without any setup. Is this the end of SQL CE? But now, back to Analysis Services: if you want some tutorial on Tabular, the Microsoft Virtual Academy has a whole track dedicated to Analysis Services 2012 but you will probably be interested also in the one about Reporting Services 2012. If you think that virtual is good but it’s not enough, there are plenty of conferences in the coming months – these are just those where I and Alberto will deliver some SSAS Tabular presentations: SQLBits X, London, March 29-31, 2012: if you are in London or want a good reason to go, this is the most important SQL Server event in Europe this year, no doubts about it. And not only because of the high number of attendees, but also because there is an impressive number of speakers (excluding me, of course) coming from all over the world. This is an event second only to PASS Summit in Seattle so there are no good reasons to not attend it. Microsoft SQL Server & Business Intelligence Conference 2012, Milan, March 28-29, 2012: this is an Italian conference so the language might be a barrier, but many of us also speak English and the food is good! Just a few seats still available. TechEd North America, Orlando, June 11-14, 2012: you know, this is a big event and it contains everything – if you want to spend a whole day learning the SSAS Tabular model with me and Alberto, don’t miss our pre-conference day “Using BISM Tabular in Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services 2012” (be careful, it is on June 10, a nice study-Sunday!). TechEd Europe, Amsterdam, June 26-29, 2012: the European version of TechEd provides almost the same content and you don’t have to go overseas. We also run the same pre-conference day “Using BISM Tabular in Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services 2012” (in this case, it is on June 25, that’s a regular Monday). I and Alberto will also speak at some user group meeting around Europe during… well, we’re going to travel a lot in the next months. In fact, if you want to get a complete training on SSAS Tabular, you should spend two days with us in one of our SSAS Tabular Workshop! We prepared a 2-day seminar, a very intense one, that start from the simple tabular modeling and cover architecture, DAX, query, advanced modeling, security, deployment, optimization, monitoring, relationships with PowerPivot and Multidimensional… Really, there are a lot of stuffs here! We announced the first dates in Europe and also an online edition optimized for America’s time zone: Apr 16-17, 2012 – Amsterdam, Netherlands Apr 26-27, 2012 – Copenhagen, Denmark May 7-8, 2012 – Online for America’s time zone May 14-15, 2012 – Brussels, Belgium May 21-22, 2012 – Oslo, Norway May 24-25, 2012 – Stockholm, Sweden May 28-29, 2012 – London, United Kingdom May 31-Jun 1, 2012 – Milan, Italy (Italian language) Also Chris Webb will join us in this workshop and in every date you can find who is the speaker on the web site. The course is based on our upcoming book, almost 600 pages (!) about SSAS Tabular, an incredible effort that will be available very soon in a preview (rough cuts from O’Reilly) and will be on the shelf in May. I will provide a link to order it as soon as we have one! And if you think that this is not enough… you’re right! Do you know what is the only thing you can do to optimize your Tabular model? Optimize your DAX code. Learning DAX is easy, mastering DAX requires some knowledge… and our DAX Advanced Workshop will provide exactly the required content. Public classes will be available later this year, by now we just deliver it on demand.

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• #MDX in London and speculation about future books

  - by Marco Russo (SQLBI)

  Chris Webb, who wrote the Expert Cube Development with Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services book with me and Alberto , is preparing another Introduction to MDX course in London, this time from October 26th to 28th. It is now a three day course (previously it was two day) and you can find every other detail here . You might be wondering whether we are writing something else... well, we don't have plan to release a new edition of the Analysis Services book - after all, all the content of the...(read more)

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• DIVIDE vs division operator in #dax

  - by Marco Russo (SQLBI)

  Alberto Ferrari wrote an interesting article about DIVIDE performance in DAX. This new function has been introduced in SQL Server Analysis Services 2012 SP1, so it is available also in Excel 2013 (which still doesn’t have other features/fixes introduced by following Cumulative Updates…). The idea that instead of writing: IF ( Sales[Quantity] <> 0, Sales[Amount] / Sales[Quantity], BLANK () ) you can write: DIVIDE ( Sales[Amount], Sales[Quantity] ) There is a third optional argument in DIVIDE that defines the result in case the denominator (second argument) is zero, and by default its value is BLANK, so I omitted the third argument in my example. Using DIVIDE is very important, especially when you use a measure in MDX (for example in an Excel PivotTable) because it raise the chance that the non empty evaluation for the result is evaluated in bulk mode instead of cell-by-cell. However, from a DAX point of view, you might find it’s better to use the standard division operator removing the IF statement. I suggest you to read Alberto’s article, because you will find that an expression applying a filter using FILTER is faster than using CALCULATE, which is against any rule of thumb you might have read until now! Again, this is not always true, and depends on many conditions – trying to simplify, we might say that for a simple calculation, the query plan generated by FILTER could be more efficient – but, as usual, it depends, and 90% of the times using FILTER instead of CALCULATE produces slower performance. Do not take anything for granted, and always check the query plan when performance are your first issue!

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• SSAS Tabular Workshop online and other upcoming dates (and updates!) #ssas #tabular

  - by Marco Russo (SQLBI)

  After many conferences and travels, this summer I had some time to write and prepare new sessions for the next wave of conferences. In reality I am just doing that, even if I already restarted traveling for consulting and training. So expect new content about DAX and Tabular coming in the next months! Starting to see real customer adopting Tabular is showing many new challenges and there is still a lot to learn and to create. If you still didn’t started working on Tabular, well, you should. As I always say, as a BI developer you should be able to choose between Tabular and Multidimensional, and in order to do that you should know both of them! One thing that I don’t like very much about marketing is that “Tabular is simpler”, because it’s often translated in “Tabular is for simple projects” when this last statement is not true. Actually, I see a lot of good reasons to adopt Tabular in complex data models, especially in non-traditional scenarios. I know, this is because I love to understand what are the actual limits of a technology, and I’m learning that there is simple a lot of space of improvement also for Tabular. It’s already fast, but it could be faster! How can you start? Well, first of all, by reading our book. Then, by attending to our SSAS Tabular workshop. There is an online edition of the workshop on September 3-4, 2012 (hurry up if you want to register), and there are already several dates planned for the next months (and others will be added soon!). And, of course, by installing SQL Server 2012 and trying to create models over your databases. If you are too lazy, just start with PowerPivot. As soon as you start working with Tabular or PowerPivot, you will see that there is one important skill you need: learning DAX. In the next few days I should publish an article that I’m finishing these days about best practices using SUMMARIZE and ADDCOLUMNS. If only someone published this article one year ago, I would have saved many hours of my life. But, you know, flight manuals are written in blood… and someone has to write! Stay tuned.

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• New training on Power Pivot with recorded video courses

  - by Marco Russo (SQLBI)

  I and Alberto Ferrari started delivering training on Power Pivot in 2010, initially in classrooms and then also online. We also recorded videos for Project Botticelli, where you can find content about Microsoft tools and services for Business Intelligence. In the last months, we produced a recorded video course for people that want to learn Power Pivot without attending a scheduled course. We split the entire Power Pivot course training in three editions, offering at a lower price the more introductive modules: Beginner: introduces Power Pivot to any user who knows Excel and want to create reports with more complex and large data structures than a single table. Intermediate: improves skills on Power Pivot for Excel, introducing the DAX language and important features such as CALCULATE and Time Intelligence functions. Advanced: includes a depth coverage of the DAX language, which is required for writing complex calculations, and other advanced features of both Excel and Power Pivot. There are also two bundles, that includes two or three editions at a lower price. Most important, we have a special 40% launch discount on all published video courses using the coupon SQLBI-FRNDS-14 valid until August 31, 2014. Just follow the link to see a more complete description of the editions available and their discounted prices. Regular prices start at $29, which means that you can start a training with less than $18 using the special promotion. P.S.: we recently launched a new responsive version of the SQLBI web site, and now we also have a page dedicated to all videos available about our sessions in conferences around the world. You can find more than 30 hours of free videos here: http://www.sqlbi.com/tv.

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• White Paper on Analysis Services Tabular Large-scale Solution #ssas #tabular

  - by Marco Russo (SQLBI)

  Since the first beta of Analysis Services 2012, I worked with many companies designing and implementing solutions based on Analysis Services Tabular. I am glad that Microsoft published a white paper about a case-study using one of these scenarios: An Analysis Services Case Study: Using Tabular Models in a Large-scale Commercial Solution. Alberto Ferrari is the author of the white paper and many people contributed to it. The final result is a very technical document based on a case study, which provides a level of detail that I don’t see often in other case studies (which are usually more marketing-oriented). This white paper has the following structure: Requirements (data model, capacity planning, client tool) Options considered (SQL Server Columnstore Indexes, SSAS Multidimensional, SSAS Tabular) Data Model optimizations (memory compression, query performance, scalability) Partitioning and Processing strategy for near real-time latency Hardware selection (NUMA analysis, Azure VM tests) Scalability tests (estimation of maximum users per node) If you are in charge of evaluating Tabular as analytical engine, or if you have to design your solution based on Tabular, this white paper is a must read. But if you just want to increase your knowledge of Analysis Services, you will find a lot of useful technical information. That said, my favorite quote of the document is the following one, funny but true: […] After several trials, the clear winner was a video gaming machine that one guy on the team used at home. That computer outperformed any available server, running twice as fast as the server-class machines we had in house. At that point, it was clear that the criteria for choosing the server would have to be expanded a bit, simply because it would have been impossible to convince the boss to build a cluster of gaming machines and trust it to serve our customers.  But, honestly, if a business has the flexibility to buy gaming machines (assuming the machines can handle capacity) – do this. Owen Graupman, inContact I want to write a longer discussion about how companies are adopting Tabular in scenarios where it is the hidden engine of a more complex solution (and not the classical “BI system”), because it is more frequent than you might expect (and has several advantages over many alternative approaches).

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• Implement Budget Allocation in DAX for Power Pivot and Tabular #powerpivot #tabular #ssas #dax

  - by Marco Russo (SQLBI)

  Comparing sales and budget, or costs and budget, is a very common operation. However, it is often the case that you have different granularities for different tables containing budget and the data to compare with. There are two ways to do that: you can limit the comparison to the granularity that is common to the two tables, or you can allocate the budget where it’s not defined. For example, if you have a budget defined by quarter and category, you might want to allocate it by month and product. In this way, you will do the comparison as you had a more granular definition of the budget, without actually having to do the manual job of allocating data (usually in an Excel worksheet!). If you want to do budget allocation in DAX, you can use the Budget Patterns we published on DAX Patterns. If you come from and MDX/OLAP background, at first you might find it hard to solve the problem of not having attribute hierarchies that helps you in propagating the budget values to lower hierarchical levels. However, I think that once you get used to DAX, you will find the behavior very predictable and easy to “debug” also for more complex allocation formula. You just have to be careful in writing the DAX formula, but probably the pattern we wrote should help you designing the right data model, without creating physical relationships to the budget table! This pattern is also based on the Handling Different Granularities scenario I discussed a couple of weeks ago.

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