New DAX Course by Marco Russo & Alberto Ferrari

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Summary of New Content:

• DAX: Calculated Columns vs. Measures (10-min video)
• Introduction to DAX (40-min video)

The first video is available to all visitors, the second one to Full Access Members only.

News

Alberto Ferrari and Marco Russo, world-renowned SSAS experts from sqlbi.com, would like to help you learn DAX: Data Analysis Expressions, the language of PowerPivot and SQL Server Analysis Services Tabular Models. For that reason, they have been working on a series of videos and articles about DAX, which will be exclusively available from ProjectBotticelli.com.

DAX is already important to BI, and its importance will grow, as Microsoft made it the foundation of Excel 2013. In case you did not know, the upcoming version of Excel uses PowerPivot xVelocity engine for data storage, overcoming many previous Excel limitations, and opening up the world of serious analytics to anyone who uses this popular tool. This is an important step in Microsoft plans for democratising BI, and for making it accessible to everyone. Today, everyone who uses Excel knows about =SUM(A1:A10). Soon, everyone will know =SUM('TableName'[ColumnName]) and I think this will have a major impact on making powerful self-service analytics simple enough to be intuitive (OK, the single quotes may cause some trouble).

There are many useful changes to Excel 2013, like the inclusion of stand-alone Power View, as well as interesting BI-focused changes to SharePoint Server. I will be focusing on the upcoming releases of those two pillars of Microsoft BI in the coming months, as I am preparing the next BI Roadshow, and an important conference. Naturally, you will be the first ones to know about them.

In the meantime, make sure you plan to learn some DAX, and please help your co-workers learn it too, as everyone's productivity benefits. Alberto says it is a beautiful language. I am very pleased to see that Microsoft decided to make it a functional, rather than an imperative language. This will lead to better code, and to more clarity. Making it as similar to Excel expressions as possible simplifies the learning curve. I hope you will make good use of our content, which we continue to expand every month, to make DAX do everything you expected it to do.

Our DAX online course now has three modules in total, two just introduced this month:

• DAX in Action! by Alberto
• DAX: Calculated Columns vs. Measures by Marco New!
• Introduction to DAX by Marco and Alberto New!

New Content in Detail

DAX: Calculated Columns vs. Measures is the starting point in learning this language. Calculated columns are calculated row-by-row when the content of a table is refreshed, whereas measures are computed at query time, by aggregating rows. However, they have different uses, including filtering or classifying data, so, as Marco explains in this video, you often need to make a trade-off between purpose and performance.

Your next step in learning DAX should cover the syntax and the basic functionality of the language. Marco explains while Alberto takes you through 9 demos in their Introduction to DAX. These guys are not mincing their words: in just 40 minutes you will also learn about: error handling, aggregation functions and iterators, counting values, logical, mathematical, and rounding functions, time and string manipulation, and date functions, covering some basic time intelligence, but more on that in the future. In terms of concepts-covered-per-minute you will certainly get your money's worth!

By the way, Alberto's and Marco's new book, co-written with Chris Webb, is back in stock. Get your hands on Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Analysis Services: The BISM Tabular Mode if you are looking for a book to back up our videos.

Special Offer—10% Discount in August

Our web site birthday promotion is still valid, but only for just a few more days. To get a 10% discount on individual 1-month, 3-month, and annual memberships, and also on annual group memberships, you can still use code 1stBIRTHDAY at checkout, until the end of August 2012. Feel free to share.

New Group Memberships and an Upcoming Price Increase

Our current membership prices are still at their original, introductory levels. We plan to increase them just a little, in the next 2 months, making the annual membership even more valuable in comparison to the shorter ones. We will announce more details in the next newsletter. If you are not a Full Access Member, but you were thinking of trying out our premium service, go ahead and grab that discounted membership now. Also, if you purchased a group membership, your prepaid coupon codes will be valid even after the prices went up, as long as they have not expired. Your codes will be valid 12 months from the date of their purchase.

In addition to the discounted annual group memberships, starting at just 2 users, we have recently introduced two new group membership plans: a 1-month and a 3-month 10, 20, 50, and 100 memberships packs. You select the number of users, and you decide between getting a pack of single-use codes, or a single, shared multi-usecode, whichever is more convenient for you. These memberships would be useful to an organisation whose users only need to view our content to learn a specific task, or to offer an inexpensive trial to your colleagues.

Thanks for reading and I hope you enjoy being our member,