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Month: August 2017

Finding DAX Measures In Use

Published 2017-08-01 by Kevin Feasel

Matt Allington shows an easy way to enumerate the DAX measures in a Power Pivot workbook in Excel:

I have written articles before about how you can extract measures from a data model using DAX Studio and also using Power Pivot Utilities.  These are both excellent tools in their own right and I encourage you to read up on those previous articles to learn more about these tools. Today however I am going to share another way you can extract a list of measures from an Excel Power Pivot Workbook without needing to install either of these 2 (excellent) software products.  I often get called in to help people with their workbooks and sometimes they don’t have the right software installed for me to extract the list of measures (ie DAX Studio or PPU).  This article explains how to extract the measures quickly without installing anything.

Matt uses a simple SQL statement to pull measure data into an Excel table, making it easy to retain the set of measures.  There are some built-in documentation possibilities with this.

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Filesystem Enumeration DMV

Published 2017-08-01 by Kevin Feasel

Erik Darling points out a new DMV in SQL Server 2017:

SQL Server 2017 RC1 dropping recently reminded me of a couple things I wanted to blog about finding in there. One that I thought was rather interesting is a new iTVF called dm_os_enumerate_filesystem. It looks like a partial replacement for xp_cmdshell in that, well, you can do the equivalent of running a dir command, with some filtering.

The addition of a search filter is particularly nice, since the dircommand isn’t exactly robust in that area. If you’ve ever wanted to filter on a date, well… That’s probably when PowerShell got invented.

If I run a simple call to the new function like so…

Click through to see Erik use the new function.

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MERGE With Deletion

Published 2017-08-01 by Kevin Feasel

Kevin Wilkie shows an example of deleting data as part of a merge operation:

The last time we were together, we learned how to use the MERGE statement when we wanted to insert rows that didn’t exist and update rows that didn’t. This time we’re going to add onto that. We’re adding the seldom used, but delightfully potent – delete rows that no longer exist in the original table.

MERGE is an enticing but dangerous piece of syntax.  It looks so nice until you realize how many bugs and oddities there are in the command.

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