Search results matching tags 'SSAS', 'DAX', and 'Analysis Services'

Advanced DAX course in May - unique date in 1H 2013 #dax #tabular #ssas #powerpivot

sqlbi — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 08:55:00 GMT

One year after the release of SQL Server 2012 I see the growing demand for DAX. There are two reasons for that: an higher number of PowerPivot users started to build more complex data models, and SSAS Tabular is starting to be adopted by a larger number of companies, with and without a previous experience on former versions of Analysis Services.

For this reasons we decided to offer a first public edition of our Advanced DAX Workshop, a training on DAX that is aimed at Advanced PowerPivot users and Analysis Services developers that want to master the DAX language. Up to now, we offered this course only for private classes, because of the limited demand, but now there is enough interest and adoption to justify an open class.

The goal of this DAX training is learning to write DAX expressions for measures and calculated columns, DAX queries for reporting needs, read DAX query plans and optimize DAX formulas. The course is a three-day workshop that includes many hands-on lab sessions, with exercises that will guide you in the learning process of the more advanced DAX concepts, enabling you to master the writing of DAX code.

The course will be in London on May 13-15, 2013. There are direct flights with a huge number of countries and cities, also outside of Europe. We do not expect to deliver other editions of this course before other 5-6 months, so don’t lose the chance to attend this intensive DAX master course. I will be the teacher in this edition and Chris Webb will assist me in organization with Technitrain. So don’t wait, early bird discount will expire in a few days, register now and join us in London!

First DAX Advanced Workshop in London, May 2013 #dax #tabular #ssas

sqlbi — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 10:21:00 GMT

Are you working with SSAS Tabular? Are you an experienced PowerPivot user? In both cases, you should be aware that there is only one skill that is important for PowerPivot and SSAS Tabular, and it is the DAX language. I and Alberto have been using DAX since 2010, wrote several books containing several chapters about DAX and we know that there is still much to do. We have plans to publish more content online (more on this in a few months…) but we realized that the number of companies building tabular models is increasing every day. The common issues we see are about design, calculation, queries and performance. All of them are related to DAX, and we understand that learning DAX requires mentoring and practice (if only we had that 3 years ago…).

Well, the good news is that now you can learn DAX deeper and faster. We created a new intensive DAX course that we called DAX Advanced Workshop. It is a three-day classroom that is aimed to Advanced PowerPivot users and Analysis Services developers that want to master the DAX language and improve their skills in performance optimization. The course includes hands-on lab sessions assisted by the trainer (me or Alberto), including exercises for creating queries, solving business problems and locating performance bottlenecks in DAX.

Prerequisite: Attendees need to have a basic knowledge of the SQL 2012 Analysis Services Tabular modeling or they need to be familiar with PowerPivot for Excel and have produced at least some basic reports. A prerequisite of the course is the participation to a SSAS Tabular or PowerPivot Workshop, or having equivalent experience.

If you think you’re ready for that, we have a single date in Europe before summer, and it will be in London on May 13-15, 2013. You can download course outline and register here. Seats are limited, hands-on-labs requires real assistance. You have to bring your laptop for hands-on-labs. It will be funny, but it will be tough!

We don’t have plans for other editions until next fall, so if you are interested, free your agenda. Unless you want an on-site edition in another date, of course.

Please, let me know if you are interested in US. You might have a good excuse to visit London, but if this is not enough, then give me your feedback. We will evaluate demand from US in order to schedule other public classes.

End of 2012 and news in 2013 for #PowerPivot, #ssas #tabular and BI

sqlbi — Thu, 27 Dec 2012 18:26:38 GMT

This year is going to end, Maya failed their predictions and while this is bad for predictive industry, it’s also good for all of us!

We’ve seen many news in Microsoft BI stack:

Excel 2013 has been RTM’d – its General Availability is expected in early 2013 but many early adopters are already using it daily (myself included)
PowerPivot and Power View are both integrated in Excel 2013 and I think that they are the most compelling reason to upgrade your Excel. Power View alone worth the effort
SQL Server 2012 has been released and I’m seeing the first SSAS Tabular projects going in production in these days.
I, Alberto and Chris published the book Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Analysis Services: The BISM Tabular Model, which has good reviews and is selling well. It’s clear that the interest is high in this new technology for Corporate BI
We also run several SSAS Tabular Workshops, many sessions about Tabular topics in conferences and user groups.
I stopped writing blogs/article in the last weeks, but don’t worry, it’s just that I and Alberto are just writing another book…
We recorded several videos about DAX for Project Botticelli and we’ll enhance this library in 2013.

So what’s next in 2013? Let’s see some anticipations and personal predictions:

SharePoint 2013 and Office 365 are going to further innovate Self-Service BI. Maybe that this process is not so fast as Microsoft hopes, but it’s a clear direction and I hope that new features in this area will appear with a sooner release cycle, we simply cannot wait other 3 years to get more features on the cloud.
Mobile BI with Microsoft Technologies is going to be a real thing in 2013. And Office for iPad should be real, too. Power View for iPad as a native application is also another important step.
I will speak at PASS BA Conference 2013 in Chicago, IL (April 10-12, 2013) – at that time, I hope much of the MS Mobile BI tools will be available to anyone.
In March 2013 our new PowerPivot book Microsoft Excel 2013: Building Data Models with PowerPivot will be published by Microsoft Press. We are working hard these days in order to complete the drafts, we listened to all of the feedback we received, especially from Excel users. Time will tell if we did a good job on that.
We will publish other content on SQLBI web site and we have some interesting news for PowerPivot users and Tabular developers… but it’s too early to discuss that. Just stay tuned! Why not registering to our newsletter? (hint – scroll down to the end of the page to insert your email)
We will announce a new PowerPivot Workshop for Excel 2013 (we are working on an updated web site – it should be ready by the end of January)
In January we will announce new dates for our SSAS Tabular Workshop and the new DAX Advanced Workshop.
I hope DAXMD will be released this year, it is already available as CTP. If you create canned reports for SSAS Multidimensional, consider using DAX as a query language when DAXMD will be released.
DAX will be always more important…

Economy is not going well in many countries, and I’ve seen this impacting also our ecosystem. Sometimes you might think that your efforts are worthless, but in the long term the investments in updating skills produces a good return, at both company and individual level. Don’t give up!

I wish you a Great 2013!

Meet SQLBI at PASS Summit 2012 #sqlpass

sqlbi — Fri, 02 Nov 2012 12:11:00 GMT

Next week I and Alberto Ferrari will be in Seattle at PASS Summit 2012. You can meet us at our sessions, at a book signing and hopefully watching some other session during the conference. Here are our appointments:

Thursday, November 08, 2012, 10:15 AM - 11:45 AM – Alberto Ferrari – Room 606-607
Querying and Optimizing DAX (BIA-321-S)
Do you want to learn how to write DAX queries and how to optimize them? Don’t miss this session!
Thursday, November 08, 2012, 12:00 PM - 12:30 PM – Bookstore
Book signing event at the Bookstore corner with Alberto Ferrari, Marco Russo and Chris Webb
Visit the bookstore and sign your copy of our Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Analysis Services: The BISM Tabular Model book.
Thursday, November 08, 2012, 1:30 PM - 2:45 PM – Marco Russo – Room 611
Near Real-Time Analytics with xVelocity (without DirectQuery) (BIA-312)
What’s the latency you can tolerate for your data? Discover what is the limit in Tabular without using DirectQuery and learn how to optimize your data model and your queries for a near real-time analytical system. Not a trivial task, but more affordable than you might think.
Friday, November 09, 2012, 9:45 AM - 11:00 AM
Parent-Child Hierarchies in Tabular (BIA-301)
Multidimensional has a more advanced support for hierarchies than Tabular, but in reality you can do almost the same things by using data modeling, DAX functions and BIDS Helper!
Friday, November 09, 2012, 1:00 PM - 2:15 PM – Marco Russo – Room 612
Inside DAX Query Plans (BIA-403)
Discover the query plan for your DAX query and learn how to read it and how to optimize a DAX query by using these information.

If you meet us at the conference, stop us and say hello: it’s always nice to know our readers!

The Many-to-Many Revolution 2.0 #ssas #mdx #dax #m2m

sqlbi — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 12:17:00 GMT

In September 2006 I had announced in this blog the release of the first version of The Many-to-Many Revolution, a whitepaper that describes how to leverage the many-to-many dimension relationships feature that had being available since Analysis Services 2005. The paper contains many generic patterns that can be applied in many common data analysis’ scenarios.

More than 5 years later and more then 20.000 unique people that downloaded the 1.0 paper, I am proud to announce that we released

The Many-to-Many Revolution 2.0.

These are the news in this edition:

Alberto Ferrari joined me as co-author of the paper
We added a new pattern for BISM Multidimensional (formerly known as UDM)
We translated several existing pattern to BISM Tabular model.
- Because BISM Tabular doesn’t support many-to-many relationships in its data model, you have to rely on DAX formulas to obtain the desired results. This produces many changes in data modeling and we tried to cover these differences in the paper, too

The paper is freely available in PDF format. We will publish single patterns described in the paper as web articles, in order to improve readability and indexing from search engines (today everybody use a web search engine instead than looking for a document in local disk, just because it’s faster).

If you are willing to watch a one-hour session about a few of the BISM Tabular models described in the paper, I suggest you to look at the Many-to-Many Relationships in DAX session that Alberto held in Liverpool at SQLBits 9 two months ago. Yes, the paper has much more details and model, but you can start with the video and then study on the paper!

We look forward to get your feedback!

First steps with #ssas #Tabular in #Denali #CTP3

sqlbi — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 04:25:00 GMT

The Analysis Services team just posted a blog entry with a few useful links to jumpstart your experience with Tabular project in Analysis Services "Denali".

In these early days I read several messages asking for clarification about the names and acronyms used in Denali. For a complete description I suggest you to read the Analysis Services - Vision & Roadmap Update published by Microsoft in May 2011 and my personal comments in this blog. However, if you are in a hurry, this is a short recap:

Analysis Services Denali has two enginges: the traditional OLAP one (the only one it had until 2008) and the new Vertipaq one (introduced by PowerPivot and now directly available without SharePoint and/or Excel).
In order to cover these two tecnologies under the same hat, a new acronym has been introduced: BISM (Business Intelligence Semantic Model)
When yuo create a project for BISM you can use either BISM Multidimensional (corresponding to a classic SSAS project based on the OLAP engine) or BISM Tabular (corresponding to the new project type based on the Vertipaq engine).
In documentation, books and article you will read Multidimensional (corresponding to BISM Multidimensional) and Tabular (corresponding to BISM Tabular).
Both Multidimensional and Tabular models can be queried by using MDX. However, internal calculation are based on DAX in Tabular and DAX can also be used to query a Tabular model. In a possibly near future, we should expect to use DAX also to query a Multidimensional project (I hope this will happen very very soon - months and not years).
When you install Analysis Services Denali you have to choose what type of engine you want to use for the instance you are installing. If you want to be able to use both engines, you need to install two instances of Analysis Services. During the setup you can choose which one you desire and Multidimensional is the default.
The UDM acronym (Unified Dimensional Model) is no longer used. An UDM project is now a BISM Multidimensional project. THere is a 100% compatibility for existing projects and from the point of view of the existing feature, BISM Multidimensional is 100% corresponding to UDM in 2008 R2. Any existing book, documentation and whitepaper is still valid in BISM Multidimensional. The Analysis Services release has improvements (there is no longer a 4GB limit for string stores, for example), fix and optimizations, but there aren't new major features in Multidimensional for this release.

Thus, if you want to test what is new in Analysis Services Denali, this is the call to action:

Install Analysis Service Denali in Tabular mode
Import your existing PowerPivot workbooks in a Tabular project (yes, you can!)
Learn DAX.
Start using the new features in Denali (you have KPI, Partitions and Security, just to name a few)
Learn DAX
Play with this new baby and stay tuned for more content in this and other blogs!
Learn DAX

In case it is not clear, if you are a BI professional, there is an important thing you have to do in order to keep your skill updated: Learn DAX!

SSAS Maestro in Madrid (July 2011) and SQLPASS in Seattle (October 2011) #ssasmaestro #sqlpass

sqlbi — Thu, 12 May 2011 23:50:16 GMT

In the last months I talked mostly about PowerPivot, but Analysis Services is still growing and a very good sign of that is the number of downloads of The Many-to-Many Revolution whitepaper, who has been published almost 5 years ago and recently surpassed 20,000 downloads. The download trend is a constant line made of tens of downloads every single working day. Considering the technical level of this paper, I think this is a terrific result. Also the sales of our Expert Cube Development with Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services are constant and there is no visible decrease after 2 years. My conclusion is that Analysis Services usage is constantly increasing and its wide adoption is also confirmed by several feedback I receive from several sources.

That being stated, it still makes sense to improve the knowledge about Analysis Services, regardless of the new features that Denali will bring to the table. All the skills in Analysis Services 2008 will still be valid in Denali when it will work in “molap” mode. The most advanced course you can attend today is the SSAS Maestro. The next edition is planned in Redmond, WA (June 13-17) and Madrid, Spain (July 18-22).

I will be one of the trainers of the Madrid edition – you can find more information about both editions, trainers and links for registration in this blog post from Denny Lee.

Looking at this fall, the PASS Summit 2011 will run in Seattle, WA on October 11-14, 2011. This year the sessions will be selected according to the community preference. You can vote the session you would like to see in the final agenda. This link points to the sessions I submitted. I proposed a DAX Deep Dive pre-conference and three “regular” sessions: What’s New in DAX 2.0, Vertipaq vs OLAP: Change Your Data Modeling Approach and Analysis Services Advanced Best Practices. A lot of DAX, but OLAP is still here. It will be interesting to see what sessions will be more voted – I look forward to see the vote result (and don’t forget to vote!).

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.