SSAS Tabular: Show balance on latest dimension attribute

Question

Hi,
I have a fact with transactions over time eg.
20140101, 1000
20140105,-400
In SSAS Tabular, I want to add a balance (saldo) measure, that shows the balance on any given date from my date dimension
Balance 20140106: 600
 I can do this by using SUMX (or summarize)
Saldo:=SUMX(
VALUES('Date'[Date])
,CALCULATE(
SUM(Fact[Amount])
,DATESBETWEEN('Date'[Date],BLANK(),LASTDATE('Date'[Date]))
,ALL('Date')
The issue arises when I want to show the balance for an attribute from a dimension related to the latest fact entry. I can calculate this on dates that has transactions like this:
Saldo_MaxFact:=MAXX(
VALUES('Fact'[FactId])
,CALCULATE(
SUM(Fact[Amount])
,DATESBETWEEN('Date'[Date],BLANK(),LASTDATE('Date'[Date]))
,ALL('Date')
,ALL('Fact'[FactId])
,ALL('Dimension')
But on dates with no transactions, this measure is empty (which makes sense, since there is no FactId to roll-up the sum to).
How would I go about creating a measure that rolls up to any given date AND the attributes on the latest fact entry?
I have created a sample snapshot: http://1drv.ms/1ly4o6a
Sample Excel Power Pivot model: http://1drv.ms/1jy2nkX
Any help would be much appreciated!

Answer 1

Hi Greg,
Finally I found the problem why the query goes out of memory in tabular mode. I guess this information will helpful for others and I am posting my findings.
Some of the non-key attribute columns in the tabular model tables (mainly the tables which form dimensions) do not contain pretty names. So for the non-key attribute columns which I need to provide pretty names I renamed the columns to something else.
For an example, in my date dimension there is a non-key attribute named “DateAltKey”. This is the date column which I am using. As this is not pretty to the client tools I renamed this column as “Date” inside the designer (Dimension
design screen). I deployed the cube, processed the cube and no problem.
Now here comes the fun part. For every table, inside the Tables node (Tabular SSAS Database > Tables) you can view the partition details. You have single partition per dimension table if you do not create extra partitions. I opened the partitions screen
and clicked on the “Edit” icon and performed a Syntax Check. Surprisingly it failed. It complains about the renamed column. It complained “Date” cannot be found in source. So I realized that I cannot simply rename the columns like that.
After that I created calculated columns (with a pretty name) for all the columns which complained and all the source columns to the calculated columns were hid from the client tools. I deployed the cube, processed the cube and performed a
syntax check. No errors and everything were perfect.
I ran the query which gave me trouble and guess what... it executed within 5 seconds. My problem is solved. I really do not know who did this improve the performance but the trick worked for me.
Thanks a lot for your support.
Chandima