I’m sitting at the bloggers table at the Day 1 keynote of PASS Summit 2015 and I try to recap the important news for the BI community. SQL Server Analysis Services 2016 CTP 3 will be available in a few days here, but Microsoft already announced the news in this release: Previously announced news (most of them already described in this ...

This morning the PASS Summit 2014 started in Seattle and during the keynote there was several announcements from Microsoft. I’m considering here only the ones about Business Intelligence (you will find other blogs around about SQL Server). In the coming months, Azure SQL Database will get new features such as column-store indexes, ...

One month ago I wrote about my sessions at PASS Business Analytics Conference 2013, in Chicago, IL on April 10-12, 2013. If you still have not registered, you can save $200 by using the code BAC228BL and you should hurry up, because there is another discount if you register within March 15, 2013. If you are too lazy to click on the previous post, ...

Today at PASS Summit 2012 there have been several announcements during the keynote. Moreover, other news have not been highlighted in the keynote but are equally if not more important for the BI community. Let’s start from the big news in the keynote (other details on SQL Server Blog): Hekaton: this is the codename for in-memory OLTP ...

Next week I and Alberto Ferrari will be in Seattle at PASS Summit 2012. You can meet us at our sessions, at a book signing and hopefully watching some other session during the conference. Here are our appointments: Thursday, November 08, 2012, 10:15 AM - 11:45 AM – Alberto Ferrari – Room 606-607 Querying and Optimizing DAX (BIA-321-S) ...

Recently I had to write a DAX formula containing a LASTDATE within the logical condition of a FILTER: I found that its behavior was not the one I expected and I further investigated. At the end, I wrote my findings in this article on SQLBI, which can be applied to any Time Intelligence function with a <dates> argument. The key ...

I will deliver two sessions at the next PASS Summit 2012: one is title Inside DAX Query Plans and the other is Near Real-Time Analytics with xVelocity (without DirectQuery). These will be two sessions that require a lot of preparation and even if I have already much to say, I still have a long work to do this summer in order to go deeper in ...

In the last months I talked mostly about PowerPivot, but Analysis Services is still growing and a very good sign of that is the number of downloads of The Many-to-Many Revolution whitepaper, who has been published almost 5 years ago and recently surpassed 20,000 downloads. The download trend is a constant line made of tens of downloads every ...

Microsoft recently announced a new roadmap for its BI architecture. The next version of SQL Server, codenamed “Denali”, is going to introduce a new semantic model named BISM (Business Intelligence Semantic Model). Analysis Services will host it and it will be queryable through MDX and DAX. DAX has been introduced in PowerPivot as an expression ...

If you’re still unsure if the workshop I’ll deliver at PASS Summit the next November - “Creating a BI solution from A to Z” - is a good choice for you or not, you can get some more details reading the brief interview here: PASS Summit Post-Con Preview - Davide Mauri Where you’ll find answers to the following questions: Is there an audience ...