Search results matching tags 'Analysis Services' and 'Conference'

Pre-Conference Seminar about DAX at TechEd 2013 #msteched #dax #ssas

sqlbi — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 12:24:00 GMT

If you are using Microsoft BI stack and you still didn’t start learning DAX, you should not wait any longer. One of the option you have is starting with one of our books, or you can also attend one of our workshop about Tabular or PowerPivot. But if you are planning to go to SQLBits or TechEd, you might also consider attending a full day about DAX, following the From 0 to DAX one-day seminar. Here are the links:

SQLBits – From 0 to DAX Training Day (Nottingham, UK - May 2, 2013)
TechEd North America – From 0 to DAX Pre-Conference Seminar (New Orleans, LA - June 2, 2013)
TechEd Europe – From 0 to DAX Pre-Conference Seminar (Madrid, Spain - June 24, 2013)

Take a look at Early Bird expiration date – you can save a good portion of your budget by registering within March 22, 2013 at any of TechEd conference. For SQLBits there is a discounted price until April 7, 2013.

Even if I’m not blogging much in these weeks, I can assure you we are working on more DAX content that we’ll publish in the next months. Stay tuned!

Discount for PASS Business Analytics Conference 2013 #passbac #ssas #sqlpass

sqlbi — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 12:02:00 GMT

One month ago I wrote about my sessions at PASS Business Analytics Conference 2013, in Chicago, IL on April 10-12, 2013. If you still have not registered, you can save $200 by using the code BAC228BL and you should hurry up, because there is another discount if you register within March 15, 2013.

If you are too lazy to click on the previous post, I will speech in two sessions:

Modern Data Warehousing Strategy
Self-Service Data Modeling

And now that Data Explorer Preview has been made public I can disclose that Data Explorer will be covered in my Self-Service Data Modeling session! I thought about writing an article about Data Explorer, but there is already a good coverage and I suggest you to read these blogs:

Introduction to Data Explorer Preview for Excel by Jason Thomas
Several posts by Chris Webb
Announcement on Data Explorer Team blog

SQLBits XI in May 2013 – many reasons to attend! #sqlbits #dax #tabular

sqlbi — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 09:33:00 GMT

I and Alberto Ferrari will speak at SQLBits XI (Nottingham, UK – May 2-4, 2013) and there are many good reasons to join us there, especially if you are interested to DAX!

Here are our sessions:

Thursday, 02 May 2013 – Training Day - From 0 to DAX

The entire day is dedicated to learning DAX, starting from the syntax and going forward with more complex syntaxes for both expressions and queries in DAX.
Technical level: the goal is to be introductive, explaining the important concepts in DAX (such as filter context, row context, context transitions) and covering the usage of the most common DAX functions.
Target audience: Information Workers interested in exploiting the many interesting features of PowerPivot for Excel 2013 and BI developers who want to learn the DAX language.
In practice: if you started using DAX two years ago and created several projects in Tabular and/or PowerPivot with complex calculations, this is not the workshop for you (read about an Advanced DAX Workshop later in this post). But if you just started your first Tabular or PowerPivot projects and you are still wondering what CALCULATE is all about, then this is definitely the right training for you!

Friday, 03 May 2013 – 10:50am – Modern Data Warehousing Strategy

How to design a Data Warehouse in 2013? Should we change something considering the introduction of in-memory technologies such as xVelocity? Is Self-Service BI affecting the way we design and implement a Corporate Data Warehouse?
This is not a session about a specific feature of a product, but features and products have their effects on the data warehouse design. We’ll stop one hour trying to understand what changes in the big picture, affecting also our day-by-day job.

Friday, 03 May 2013 – 2:40pm – Inside xVelocity InMemory Engine (VertiPaq)

Do you use PowerPivot and/or Analysis Services Tabular? They use the same engine (xVelocity/VertiPaq) and you should know how it works.
This session will show how xVelocity/VertiPaq works, how it compresses and stores data and why it is so fast answering to your queries.
Why this is important? Because it is geeky! And because this knowledge will help you optimizing storage and DAX queries.

Saturday, 04 May 2013 – 10:50am – DAX Query Engine Internals

DAX is amazingly fast. But some query might be not fast enough.
Do you want to know how to optimize your DAX query? This session is for you.
Knowing the internals of xVelocity InMemory engine is just the first step (see Friday’s session). Then you need to apply this knowledge to DAX and understand why different DAX syntaxes for the same result might have different performance.
Understanding cross-filtering is a key to master DAX optimization. The more you know DAX, the more you will appreciate this session!

As I said before, the training day is an introductive course. If you already know DAX and want to improve your skills, there is a 3-day Advanced DAX Workshop I will teach in London on May 13-15, 2013. It could be also a good reason to visit London if you come from other countries!

Now that we are almost done with the PowerPivot for Excel 2013 book, we will write more articles – stay tuned!

First spring conference: PASS Business Analytics Conference and SQL Bits #passbac #sqlbits #sqlpass

sqlbi — Fri, 08 Feb 2013 15:50:00 GMT

Spring is a conferences’ season and the upcoming one is no exception. I will be speaking at PASS Business Analytics Conference 2013, which will be the first event this year, so I’d like to spend a few words about my sessions.

PASS Business Analytics Conference 2013
April 10-12, 2013 | Chicago, IL – United States

This conference is targeted to Business Analytics professionals. Thus, I expect to meet both BI Developers, Excel Advanced Users, Data Analyst and, of course, the new Data Scientist role (if you have a business card with such a definition, please drop me one, so I can demonstrate to skeptic people that this figure actually exists!). I have two sessions:

Modern Data Warehousing Strategy

April 11th, 2013 – 1:30 pm – Chicago Ballroom VIII
Track: Strategy and Architecture
The recent introduction of new technologies such as PowerPivot, the BI Semantic Model, and columnstore indexes in SQL Server and advances in self-service business intelligence and big data might be considered threats to the classic data warehouse ecosystem. In reality, a good data warehouse is still the best starting point for any kind of analysis, but we do need to update our strategy for data warehouse implementation to fit the requirements of this new era. This session will start the conversation about what a modern strategy for data warehousing can and should be. What type of data modeling should we use for the data warehouse? What is the role of data marts? Does the use of technologies such as PowerPivot or Analysis Services Tabular affect the way we should model our data? Do columnstore indexes remove the need for an analytical server like Analysis Services? We will discuss these and other questions, offering an updated approach to the data warehouse modeling methodology.

Self-Service Data Modeling

April 12th, 2013 – 1:30 pm – Sheraton Ballroom I & II
Track: Data Analytics and Visualization
Self-service business intelligence looks promising, empowering information workers to grab amazing insights from data. But are Excel 2013 and DAX language knowledge enough to analyze data? The answer in most cases is no – information workers will also need an ability to properly model their data and the skill to use some new tools to reshape data in the correct way. In this session, we will analyze some common problem scenarios where data analysis is difficult due to the shape of the model and see how to solve them.

In theory, I expect two different audiences at the two sessions, but I know that there will be people attending both, especially who provides tools to end users. I’d like to receive feedback about what you would expect to see in such sessions (regardless you will attend or not!), so that I check if I defined the correct expectations for the audience.

If you want to attend, register before March 15 in order to get a discounted price. You can also save $200 by using the code BAC228BL. See you in Chicago!

The Microsoft BI Roadmap: BISM, UDM and Beyond

sqlbi — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 13:05:00 GMT

Microsoft recently announced a new roadmap for its BI architecture. The next version of SQL Server, codenamed “Denali”, is going to introduce a new semantic model named BISM (Business Intelligence Semantic Model). Analysis Services will host it and it will be queryable through MDX and DAX. DAX has been introduced in PowerPivot as an expression language, but it will be extended in Denali to provide also query capabilities, but it will keep its nature of a “functional” language.

A more complete description about this roadmap has been published in a blog post made by the SSAS development team. Since we still don’t have a working beta product to test (CTP1 of Denali doesn’t include any new feature in SSAS) I can only make some consideration based on the many information I gathered at PASS Summit 2010 and during private meetings and conversations with members of the SSAS development team. You can of course read other interesting posts from Chris Webb and Teo Lachev to look at some concerns the announcements made at PASS have been raised up in the MS BI Community.

In the long term, the Microsoft strategy is to provide a platform for BI to everyone that will provide the same basic building blocks to any user interested in building a data model for any kind of reporting or analytical needs. Many tried to do the same in the past, and Microsoft tried the same too by introducing UDM (Unified Dimensional Model) several years ago. UDM is great to build models that can be expressed in a multidimensional way, but it might be too complex to be used for simple reporting purposes. Its learning curve requires a certain investment just to start with a simple project. And many developers that are used to SQL simply refuse to approach MDX and UDM just to build a few reports. For these reasons, and also to contrast other vendor’s products, Microsoft is going to introduce a new “big thing”, which is BISM.

To describe BISM, the best thing is looking at PowerPivot today. You can define a model by simply defining tables, relationships and calculations, which are made by using DAX. These concepts are very familiar to both Excel users and developers who are used to relational databases. So, why not using SQL? The reason is that in PowerPivot (and then in BISM) the relationships are part of the model, whereas in a RDBMS a relationship is just a relational constraint. And, most important, DAX is a language that is very simple at the beginning, and that can be learned in a very incremental way. Under the cover, there is a calculation engine called Vertipaq. It is very fast. Faster than any competitor and also faster than columnar indexes that will be implemented in SQL Denali. But BISM will also allow querying an underlying relational database in pass-through mode – in Denali only SQL Server will be supported for this type of real-time usage. Something that is very important to enable BISM as the “unified model” for any reporting need. Finally, to query BISM you can use MDX and, in Denali, also DAX (which will be extended for this purpose), making it easier to express a query over a set of unrelated tables, something that would be nearly impossible in MDX and UDM today.

BISM sounds very promising and the long term strategy is very consistent. What caused many concerns in many of us is the transition strategy. After many discussions and many thoughts, I have this roadmap to share with you:

UDM is here to stay. It is a full multidimensional model that can be used to create complex models with complex calculations. If your business model fits well in a multidimensional model, this is something that can make your life easier
BISM will not replace UDM. At least, it will not replace all the feature of UDM very soon. In the long term, BISM will be able to satisfy all of the requirements of any data analysis and reporting needs. But in its first release it will not have this level of coverage.
BISM will be far better of similar products of other vendors, even if UDM will be more advanced of BISM for very specific requirements. At least, this is the goal for Microsoft. If you look at BISM and UDM in this perspective, it gives much more sense to the overall architecture. BISM will be much more interesting than UDM to customers that are used to other BI technologies, which are less advanced than UDM but good enough for their own requirements.
Existing UDM implementations will continue to work in SSAS. There are no reasons to plan a migration by now. Only after BISM will be released in a version that will be able to satisfy all the existing requirements for your project, than a migration might be considered. But it will not be required, because UDM is not going to be deprecated. The recent case-study of a 12TB cube implemented by Yahoo! should be a good point to support this statement.
New projects starting before the Denali release should be implemented by using UDM. Only in case where UDM doesn’t fit the requirements (i.e. massive leaf-level calculations resulting in low performance) then an early adoption of Denali should be considered.
New projects starting after Denali release should be implemented in BISM if it fits all the requirements. Probably, many projects that wouldn’t have implemented in UDM today (because some SSRS reports on a RDBMS are “good enough”,) might be considered for a BISM implementation. This is probably the key selling point for Microsoft: getting new customers for Analysis Services by offering BISM as a more affordable entry point for a BI solution than UDM. Ideally, this category will contain also all those projects that today would be implemented in UDM just because it is the only “semantic model” that they have today to make a user able to navigate data by using Excel.
In the years to come, as long as the BISM will be always more feature-complete compared to UDM, it will become a viable alternative to UDM. Only time and user adoption will tell if BISM will be able to completely replace UDM. From my point of view, it will require at least three release cycles to reach a point of real competition. It means that we will see new projects starting in UDM at least since 2015. Considering the traditional policy support of Microsoft, any investment made on UDM will be safe at least until 2025/2030. It’s a very long time.

Thus, I’m really confident with the strategy about the server side. I still need to hear more news about the client-side, even if rumors seem better than actual evidence.

Excel is the primary BI client tool. It navigates data by using MDX. It natively supports both UDM and BISM. It seems that there is an important ongoing effort that will see the light in the next release of Excel. I really don’t have any other information here and I can only speculate about some of the former ProClarity features will be implemented inside Excel. What I know is that the resources that are involved in the BI client part of Excel are higher than ever today.
Crescent is the codename for a new ad hoc reporting and data visualization tool that functionally resembles Data Analyzer. Yes, it is completely new, much more graphical, more interactive… but the basic idea is fundamentally the same. It is (like Data Analyzer was) a complementary tool to Excel, and not an alternative one. This tool was supposed to generate queries only in DAX. This would exclude the possibility of querying an existing UDM model. However, I would wait a few weeks for an official statement by Microsoft about Crescent support of existing UDM models.
Reporting Services and Report Builder should support BISM in a native way. Today it already supports UDM through MDX. It should be able to query BISM in MDX as well, but supporting DAX should be considered to make life easier to those developers who are not used to MDX. I don’t have information about this kind of support, but it should be the natural evolution.
I haven’t heard any news about PerformancePoint, but I can imagine it will have BISM support as a natural evolution as well. However, because PerformancePoint should be aligned with Excel, we should see a new version of Excel and PerformancePoint only in 2013, I suppose. However, MDX will be available to query BISM from PerformancePoint, in case a Service Pack with BISM support will not be released in time.

As you can see, we are just at the beginning of a major wave of innovation in the BI space. In this case, the innovation start from the Self-service BI and will grow-up until it will reach the corporate BI at a more pervasive level. A key point of the Microsoft strategy is the Vertipaq engine. Only in these days I started to understand how much disruptive this technology can be. I know very well that several UDM cubes in these days run on server that have more RAM than the cube size. Not every project is inside these boundaries, but many are. And with Vertipaq compression, the bar is simply higher.

Finally, these are my advices for the current and future BI developments:

If you are a company who want to start a BI project, don’t wait and go to UDM now.
If you are a BI firm or consultant, start your training for DAX by using PowerPivot. It is an excellent tool for prototyping and you can use it to train yourself and to prepare proof of concepts of BI models for your customers. Then continue the implementation using UDM by now. Commercial: my recent book has several chapters about DAX, too.
When a feature-complete CTP of Denali will be available later next year (maybe not very soon) start to explore it to understand its capabilities and whether they can fit your requirements or not.
Once BISM will reach a feature set that satisfy your requirements for a new project, start to consider it because development time might be considerably lower and skills required could be easier to build, especially if your data model is not too complex.
Whatever you do in your professional life, if you are reading this blog you have to learn DAX. You can start today and my recent book can be a good start point also to cover more advanced data models and calculations.

A final thought is about MDX. I know that mastering MDX is hard, but I cannot say that DAX is so simpler. Yes, it is simpler at the beginning, but for more complex calculations, the required DAX expression might be more complex than the corresponding MDX one. Coming from a relational background (SQL) DAX is more intuitive at the beginning, but coming from an MDX background it is easier to learn the more advanced part of DAX that allows you to create the more complex and powerful expressions that solve real-world complex problems in a very efficient way. Thus, also your investments in MDX are preserved. Your MDX queries will still run and you will still be able to write new MDX queries. But the more important asset you have is the MDX knowledge and understanding, which puts you in pole position to really master DAX too, even if a further study will still be required.