Acknowledgments

Writing this second edition required an entire year’s worth of work, three months more than the first edition. It has been a long and amazing journey, connecting people all around the world in any latitude and time zone to be able to produce the result you are going to read. We have so many people to thank for this book that we know it is impossible to write a complete list. So, thanks so much to all of you who contributed to this book—even if you had no idea that you were doing so. Blog comments, forum posts, email discussions, chats with attendees and speakers at technical conferences, analysis of customer scenarios, and so much more have been useful to us, and many people have contributed significant ideas to this book. Moreover, big thanks to all the students of our courses: By teaching you, we got better!

That said, there are people we must mention personally, because of their particular contributions.

We want to start with Edward Melomed: He has inspired us, and we probably would not have started our journey with the DAX language without a passionate discussion we had with him several years ago and that ended with the table of contents of our first book about Power Pivot written on a napkin.

We want to thank Microsoft Press and the people who contributed to the project: They all greatly helped us along the process of book writing.

The only job longer than writing a book is the studying you must do in preparation for writing it. A group of people that we (in all friendliness) call “ssas-insiders” helped us get ready to write this book. A few people from Microsoft deserve a special mention as well, because they spent a lot of their precious time teaching us important concepts about Power BI and DAX: They are Marius Dumitru, Jeffrey Wang, Akshai Mirchandani, Krystian Sakowski, and Cristian Petculescu. Your help has been priceless, guys!

We also want to thank Amir Netz, Christian Wade, Ashvini Sharma, Kasper De Jonge, and T. K. Anand for their contributions to the many discussions we had about the product. We feel they helped us tremendously in strategic choices we made in this book and in our career.

We wanted to reserve a special mention to a woman who did an incredible job improving and cleaning up our English. Claire Costa proofread the entire manuscript and made it so much easier to read. Claire, your help is invaluable—Thanks!

The last special mention goes to our technical reviewer: Daniil Maslyuk carefully tested every single line of code, text, example, and reference we had written. He found any and all kinds of mistakes we would have missed. He rarely made comments that did not require a change in the book. The result is amazing for us. If the book contains fewer errors than our original manuscript, it is only because of Daniil’s efforts. If it still contains errors, it is our fault, of course.

Thank you so much, folks!