November 2010 Entries



Do DAX and MDX need a safe divide operator?

I’ve been teaching an MDX course for the last few days as well as reading Marco and Alberto’s excellent PowerPivot book on the train and it struck me that every time I do a division in both languages I seem to be using the following pattern in order to avoid returning an error to the user MDX: IIF( <denominator> = 0, NULL, <numerator> / <denominator> ) DAX: IF( <denominator> = 0, BLANK(), <numerator> / <denominator> ) I know that languages like C++ and C# don’t ......

New Technical Article on the Columnstore (Vertipaq) indexes in Denali

You may have already heard some information about the fact that Vertipaq indexes that are coming in the next version of SQL Server code named "Denali" following the announcements last week at PASS. If you want some more detailed information there is a new technical article available for download: Columnstore Indexes for Fast Data Warehouse Query Processing in SQL Server 11.0 which goes into more depth about how this will all work ......

Holy Cow Bat Man! –PASS Summit Keynote Day 1

Wow. There were a stack of announcements made at the key note. So I thought I would try to jot then down while I'm just waiting for my first technical session a Deep Dive on PowerPivot to start. The Parallel Data Warehouse Edition of SQL Server 2008 R2 has been released to manufacturing, there was a demo with a query over an 800 Billion record table that was returning in 19 seconds on a 40 node parallel cluster. Yahoo came up and talked about an SSAS cube of theirs, it's 12TB in size and they load ......

MDX: Implicit Recursion

A few months ago Richard Lees did a blog post showing how you can calculate a LastNonEmpty measure using recursion. In Richard's example he used what I call "explicit recursion" in that he explicitly referenced the measure in it's own expression. An example of this sort of calculation against Adventure Works would look like the following. WITH MEMBER Measures.LastNonEmptyExplicit AS IIF(IsEmpty(Measures.[Internet Sales Amount]) ,([Date].[Calendar].PrevMem... Measures.[LastNonEmptyExpli... ,Measures.[Internet ......

The PASS 2010 conference is approaching fast

Next week is the 2010 PASS conference. This will be my second PASS conference and I'm really looking forward to it. The content is great and I love the chance to meet up in person with all the really great people in the SQL community that come from all different parts of the world just to talk about SQL Server. On Tuesday 9th for Lunch I am hosting a "Birds of a Feather" table on "SSAS Triple A – Administration, Automation and APIs". Between PowerSSAS, BIDSHelper and the ASSP projects on codeplex ......

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I am a consultant, based in Melbourne Australia. I primarily work in the Business Intelligence area with SQL Server, although I also dabble in Content Management Server and .Net coding

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