DAX vs. MDX vs. T-SQL

Recently I delivered a session at local conference organized by Microsoft Croatia - WinDays¹º. The title of the presentation was: “DAX vs MDX vs T-SQL”.

As its name suggests, the presentation is oriented towards SQL and BI developers (for change) instead of Excel power-users and compares DAX calculations with T-SQL and MDX expressions. The idea behind, besides improving my T-SQL skills and learning DAX, was to build a mental model of what DAX functions and their combinations actually do by finding their best analogies in other languages. Since there are more than a hundred DAX functions, I’ve concentrated primarily on those that use relations. On one hand, they are probably the most difficult group of functions in DAX. On another, they should be the closest to SQL and BI developers’ mindset.

Read more... (note: Very good PowerPivot presentation slide deck)