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OVER clause in SQL Server 2012
Changes to the OVER clause RANGE / ROWS clause The new ROWS keyword in SQL Server 2012 expression allows us to specify the window frames over which our expressions will be evaluated. The following ROWS...
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Downloading multiple files from Skydrive
I have just downloaded a few PowerPoint sample files from Skydrive. To keep track of the downloaded files, I created a folder, as I usually do. You know what? I did not need to do that. Skydrive...
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What’s new for Excel 2013 – Personal observations
The customer preview of Office 2013 is finally available, and there is a lot of new things to look at, be it for users or for developers. Here are a few personal observations based on my first look at...
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Slicers and Drill-through in Excel.
While I was playing around with Excel 2013, I noticed some inconsistency in the way slicers behave depending on whether they are used to filter a PowerPivot table, or whether they are used to filter a...
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DAX Queries in Excel 2013
The “old” drill-through trick that could be used in Office 2010 and PowerPivot v2 no longer works in Excel 2013. You can no longer edit the connection for the resulting table. Luckily, this is no...
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DAX Queries in Excel 2013 : using ROLLUP to cover some UNION scenarios
DAX does not offer a UNION function or operator. There are a few scenarios where this would be useful. The scenario Consider the following table called Games. This is a very simple table. Basically,...
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Fun facts about Transact-SQL syntax
Magic COUNT The following query is valid: SELECT COUNT(*) It returns 1. Can someone see why? GROUP BY nothing The following group by clause is valid: GROUP BY () It groups by “nothing”. A query with...
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Analytic functions in SQL Server 2012 – Part I – Distributions
In this article, I take a look at the analytic functions in SQL Server 2012 to handle frequency distributions. CUME_DIST The CUME_DIST function returns the percentage of records that are of same or...
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Analytic functions in SQL Server 2012–Part II -
For the rest of this article, suppose you have a table describing events, with the following columns: EmployeeID: the ID of the employee who triggered the event ItemID: the ID of the item for which the...
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Notes on “Usage of dates argument in a row context” by Marco Russo
Marco Russo recently blogged about the usage of dates arguments in a row context. The measure he presents as producing “wrong results”, actually produces the results I expected. For this reason, I had...
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Attribute relationships and cube space in SSAS
Defining attributes on your dimension will improve processing and querying performance but might also affect the results of your queries, sometimes leading to unexpected results. This has already been...
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Bug in PowerPivot 2012 for Excel 2010
I spotted what I firmly believe to be a bug in PowerPivot. If you already met this problem and/or can reproduce this issue, please support this ticket on MS Connect. An MS employee might – someday ,...
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Equivalent of VLOOKUP in DAX–Part I
One frequent DAX requirement is to write a formula that behaves like the VLOOKUP function in Excel. Gehrard Brueckl recently blogged about how to map a date to a fiscal period, when fiscal periods are...
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Equivalent of VLOOKUP in DAX – Part II – using TOPN
In my previous entry, I presented the LOOKUPVALUE function. In this article, I will explain how you can use the TOPN function to mimic the behavior of VLOOKUP when doing “approximate” searches. Ken...
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Microsoft Data Explorer–a review
As you are probably aware, Microsoft released a Preview version of the Data Explorer add-In. It is currently available for Excel 2010 and Excel 2013. Hopefully, this will still be true for the release...
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Using a self-signed SSL certificate with SQL Server
Learning to configure SQL Server to use a self-signed SSL certificate was not really part of my training plan. However, Data Explorer required SSL encryption to connect to SQL Server. On the same day I...
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Analytic functions in SQL Server 2012 – Part I – Distributions
In this article, I take a look at the analytic functions in SQL Server 2012 to handle frequency distributions. CUME_DIST The CUME_DIST function returns the percentage of records that are of same or...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Analytic functions in SQL Server 2012–Part II –
For the rest of this article, suppose you have a table describing events, with the following columns: EmployeeID: the ID of the employee who triggered the event ItemID: the ID of the item for which the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Notes on “Usage of dates argument in a row context” by Marco Russo
Marco Russo recently blogged about the usage of dates arguments in a row context. The measure he presents as producing “wrong results”, actually produces the results I expected. For this reason, I had...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Attribute relationships and cube space in SSAS
Defining attributes on your dimension will improve processing and querying performance but might also affect the results of your queries, sometimes leading to unexpected results. This has already been...
View Article