During the last months I and Alberto worked in several projects using Analysis Services Tabular and we had to face real world issues, such as complex queries, large data volume, frequent data updates and so on. Sometime we faced the challenge of comparing Tabular performance with SQL Server. It seemed a non-sense, because even if the same core ...

It has been a long wait, but finally our book about Analysis Services Tabular is available! Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Analysis Services: The BISM Tabular Model Amazon is already shipping it in US and it should be available soon also in Europe. However, the Kindle edition is already available everywhere! If you like to order it on Amazon, here ...

We finally have the registration website for the community event about Tabular in Analysis Services in Amsterdam on April 16 evening that I introduced in my previous post - don't miss it, the registration are open (and limited!) at: http://passnl-april2012.eventbrite.com/ This is really a ''last-minute'' event, but we're pretty confident ...

One week ago Microsoft SQL Server 2012 finally debuted with a virtual launch event and you can find many intro sessions there (20 minutes each). There is a lot of new content available if you want to learn more about SQL 2012 and in this blog post I’d like to provide a few link to sessions, documents, bits and courses that are available now or ...

A few months ago I gave a speech at SQLBits 9 comparing Vertipaq vs. OLAP (you can watch session recording here), which I repeated a few times in other conferences and webcasts. The title was intentionally provocative but it contained an explanation of the real content – in fact it is “Vertipaq vs OLAP: Change Your Data Modeling Approach”. In ...

The upcoming release of SQL Server 2012 has a lot of new features for business intelligence developers to love. The free preview of Introducing Microsoft SQL Server 2012 (Microsoft Press, 2012) does not include the chapter on Analysis Services, but you’ll be able to read the details when the final version of the ebook is released for ...

We are going very close to the release of SQL Server 2012 and after using Analysis Services 2012 for almost one year in a relatively small number of scenarios, I’m really curios to see the questions and the issues that will emerge when its adoption will go mainstream. I expect that many will consider a Tabular instance of Analysis Services similar ...

When you create a PowerPivot workbook or a BISM Tabular model (new in Analysis Services 2012), you store data by using the VertiPaq engine, which is an in-memory columnar database. Instead of considering the row of a table as the main unit of storage, it considers every column as a separate entity and stores data for every column in a separate ...

The Microsoft TechEd Europe 2012 will be in Amsterdam this year on June 26-29. The day before (25 June 2012) there are several pre-conference seminars and I’m glad to announce that I and Alberto Ferrari will deliver this one: Using BISM Tabular in Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services 2012 […] After an initial introduction of the ...

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 ...