DAX vs MDX Smackdown!

Last Monday Damu Venkatesan and I presented DAX vs MDX Smackdown! to the Atlanta Microsoft BI group. I thought it went well, but could definitely use some tweaking. In fact, it may be worth it to overhaul the presentation and focus on DAX. Here are a few of my thoughts about the presentation:

1. More needs to be added to establish the use of DAX. I didn’t do a good job with this and assumed everyone was familiar with the Tabular model.
2. I showed all of the queries in SSMS, which confused some people. The resolution here is to build a PowerPivot report and show the result from there. Then I can take it into SSMS and show the end result in PowerPivot and finally Power View.
3. I need to spend more time telling the story of each query. Some of this was due to technical issues, but I still need to improve here. Damu did a very good job with stories about the MDX queries.
4. Make sure the entire environment is installed on my VM. I had multiple SSAS instances, but didn’t have Excel or SharePoint installed. This would have helped me to elaborate on several questions.

On the technical side there were issues too. My Lenovo had issues with the projector and I could only see on screen and not the laptop. This was also at a very low resolution, so all of my work setting up SSMS for readability was lost. I need to find a backup plan here and find out what other people are doing.

I’d also like to thank Teo Lachev for his help before, during and after the presentation.

All in all it went well. It is always easier to pick out what went wrong instead of what went well. I am looking forward to doing it again soon.