This post covers the most common methods for deploying tabular models while explaining the trade offs for each option. Here are some questions to help you decide which one is most appropriate for your environment: Will you (the SSAS expert) be deploying the solution or do you need to hand it off to a production […]
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When deciding to deploy an Analysis Services solution to the cloud, one of the very first decisions to make is whether to go with an Infrastructure-as-a-Service or Platform-as-a-Service architecture. The diagram below does a good job in explaining the differences between the two. Source: http://www.hostingadvice.com/how-to/iaas-vs-paas-vs-saas/ Note: from an Analysis Services cloud architecture perspective, the “Software-as-a-Service” […]
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What is Super DAX?
In a recent post, I mentioned something called Super DAX without giving it a very detailed explanation. If you’ve been working with SSAS for a few years and have a couple of Tabular projects under your belt, you may already be familiar with some of the performance improvements that roll up under the term “Super […]
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SSAS Multidimensional and Super DAX
An interesting question came up during a recent engagement involving Power BI reporting against a Multidimensional data source. The client wanted to know if there was any benefit for them in upgrading from SSAS 2014 Multidimensional to SSAS 2016 Multidimensional. My initial response was “no, there would be little benefit in carrying out that upgrade… […]
Among the many new features coming w/ SSAS 2017, object-level security for tabular models is at (or close to) the top of the list for a few clients I work with. In fact, for 1 client, it is/was important enough that we decided to join the early adopter program (EAP) and officially run the preview […]
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Power Query = Mind Blown
The Power Query engine was first introduced as an Excel plugin (back when it was referred to as “Data Explorer”)… then we saw it again in Power BI Desktop… then again earlier this year in SSAS Tabular… and now (or very soon) as a cloud service. Quite frankly, I’ve been ignoring the whole Power Query […]
It wasn’t until just a few weeks ago, while performing a design assessment on a very large tabular model, that I was finally able to appreciate one of the most underrated improvements made in SSAS Tabular 2016. This particular client was on SSAS 2014 and had a very mature tabular model consisting of… 64 tables […]
Forgetting to shutdown your Azure environments and burning through a month’s worth of Azure MSDN credit if you’re lucky (and racking up a large credit card charge if you’re not) is a pretty common experience these days. Some might even call it a right-of-passage (like running a DELETE statement in PROD and forgetting the WHERE-clause). […]
At some point in the past couple weeks/months, the Azure Analysis Services team managed to expose a few more metrics to the Azure AS Monitoring / Metrics blade. Last I checked, there were only 2 metrics available… Memory and QPU… arguably two of the most important metrics to track as they indicate if/when it’s time to […]
April was a big month for the Azure Analysis Services community – as the product has finally been released for General Availability! Unfortunately, this also means bye bye to preview-pricing. Thankfully, there’s a new “tier” available to choose from when provisioning an Azure AS instance to help offset the price increase. Before this week, there […]
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