As mentioned in the introduction, this book only concerns itself with Analysis Services Multidimensional models. With Analysis Services 2012, however, there is a second type of Analysis Services: Tabular models. Analysis Services Tabular models do much the same thing as Analysis Services Multidimensional models—an end user would probably not be able to tell if they were querying one type or the other—but the development experience and the underlying technology of the two types of models are very different.

The development experience for Analysis Services Tabular models is very similar to that of Power Pivot: the basic concepts are relational, you load data into tables and you create relationships between tables; there's a big contrast between this and the world of dimensions, attributes, measure groups, and cubes that we'll encounter in this book. The approach the Tabular model takes makes it very easy to create simple models, but arguably makes it harder...