Platinum Sponsor
AlbertoFerrari_240x320.jpg

Alberto Ferrari

Alberto Ferrari is a Business Intelligence consultant. Alberto helped several software houses to build complex BI solutions, from the OLTP to the final OLAP cubes, providing planning hints all over the development lifecycle. He is a book author also, having worked on "Exper Cube Development with Microsoft SQL Server 2008" with Marco Russo and Chris Webb and Microsoft PowerPivot for Excel 2010: Give Your Data Meaning with Marco Russo.
http://sqlblog.com/blogs/alberto_ferrari/default.aspx http://sqlblog.com/blogs/alberto_ferrari/rss.aspx

Sessions

During this session we are going to analyze common business problems that require and advanced usage of DAX functions and data modeling with PowerPivot.
Deep dive into the handling of many to many relationships in DAX. How to make them work and how to optimize their speed thorugh many patterns and live examples of M2M usage.
We are going to show how to compute classical time intelligence with the built-in DAX functions. Then, we will show some more complex time intelligence formulas that require to think out of the box, using advanced data modeling techniques.

Blog posts RSS

Clever Hierarchy Handling in DAX 30 Apr 2012
Hierarchy handling in DAX is not very easy, due to the fact that hierarchies, unlike it was in MDX, are not first-class citizens in the DAX world. While hierarchies can be easily defined in the data model, there are no DAX functions that let you access,...(read more)

Speaking at Lisbon NetPonto UG on 02/13/2012 09 Feb 2012
As you might (or not) know, I travel a lot for work and, when possible, I always try to speak at local user groups. It is fun and I always learn a lot by speaking with other professionals like me. Being in Lisbon next week, I’ll deliver a speech at Microsoft...(read more)

OT: A Good Reason to Attend #SQLBits 30 Jan 2012
My 4yo son keeps asking me why I should leave home so often to attend SQL conferences around the world and today, after a couple of days of snow, he discovered a good reason, along with the best place for the SQLBits scarf....(read more)

Circular Dependencies in DAX 03 Jan 2012
What is a circular dependency? If A depends on B and B depends on A, then you have a circular dependency. As programmers, we know that they should be avoided to obtain a working system. All this looks fine but, when authoring a simple DAX formula containing...(read more)

SUM or SUMX? With Simple Intermediate Calculations SUMX Is The Way To Go 26 Oct 2011
Data modeling in Tabular is different from Multidimensional. I spend much time teaching people that they need to change their mind when approaching the Vertipaq engine, because it is a different tool with different capabilities. Nevertheless, I still...(read more)