On November 4, 2009, Alberto and I had dinner with many other Analysis Services experts from all around the world, including many people from the Microsoft development team. We were in Seattle for the PASS Summit 2009, a conference for SQL Server professionals, and because Redmond, Washington is very near to Seattle, events like this often give you a chance to meet people you know only through e-mail. At that time, PowerPivot had just become the official name for what we had been calling Gemini for the past year, and we were continuing to call it Gemini. That dinner was very pleasant; I admit we were very geeky conversationalists, but everyone was very interested in Analysis Services–related topics and there were no guests outside the discipline, so we talked.

We were discussing the future of Analysis Services, and if you wonder why this is relevant to PowerPivot, it might help to know that PowerPivot was developed by the same team that produced Analysis Services, and these two products share a lot of technology. So Gemini (well, we were still not used to the new name) was part of many discussions.

Alberto, Chris Webb, and I were also celebrating the publishing of another book, Expert Cube Development with Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services, which we wrote in 2009 without having a single physical meeting. (Alberto and I live in Italy and Chris lives in the U.K.) I was at a table with Edward Melomed and happened to say something like “PowerPivot is just too simple, it doesn’t deserve a book by itself,” which induced Edward to list all the PowerPivot topics that could justify a book (and more!). I was not convinced, but just as a joke I started writing the table of contents of a PowerPivot book on the paper table cover. At that time, I was still unfamiliar with PowerPivot, and DAX was still relatively new to me. However, after an hour of brainstorming about this book, I had the schema of its contents on the table. At the end of the dinner, I cut the piece of table cover containing my table of contents and started wondering about this book. To write or not to write it?

Well, you already know the answer. After a few weeks (maybe days), I fully understood why this book was necessary and why PowerPivot is not a gadget for Excel, but rather is a tool that will grow in importance and will be adopted by many people who need to analyze their data without the aid of experts to design a complete BI solution in the standard way.