Book Image

Hands-On SQL Server 2019 Analysis Services

By : Steve Hughes
Book Image

Hands-On SQL Server 2019 Analysis Services

By: Steve Hughes

Overview of this book

SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) continues to be a leading enterprise-scale toolset, enabling customers to deliver data and analytics across large datasets with great performance. This book will help you understand MS SQL Server 2019’s new features and improvements, especially when it comes to SSAS. First, you’ll cover a quick overview of SQL Server 2019, learn how to choose the right analytical model to use, and understand their key differences. You’ll then explore how to create a multi-dimensional model with SSAS and expand on that model with MDX. Next, you’ll create and deploy a tabular model using Microsoft Visual Studio and Management Studio. You'll learn when and how to use both tabular and multi-dimensional model types, how to deploy and configure your servers to support them, and design principles that are relevant to each model. The book comes packed with tips and tricks to build measures, optimize your design, and interact with models using Excel and Power BI. All this will help you visualize data to gain useful insights and make better decisions. Finally, you’ll discover practices and tools for securing and maintaining your models once they are deployed. By the end of this MS SQL Server book, you’ll be able to choose the right model and build and deploy it to support the analytical needs of your business.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
1
Section 1: Choosing Your Model
4
Section 2: Building and Deploying a Multidimensional Model
8
Section 3: Building and Deploying Tabular Models
12
Section 4: Exposing Insights while Visualizing Data from Your Models
15
Section 5: Security, Administration, and Managing Your Models

Creating a tabular model with DirectQuery

Now that we have created our first model, which was built on a data refresh or data load model, we will create a tabular model with DirectQuery in this section. By way of a brief reminder, a DirectQuery model does not store the data in Analysis Services; it sends native queries to the data source to return the data that was requested. We will be creating a new project and model that will be designed from the ground up for DirectQuery.

Copy issues with models and converting to DirectQuery

While the documentation notes that you can simply change the mode to DirectQuery and fix any errors, this did not occur with our model. After removing partitions, we continued to receive odd errors, so we are going to create the model from scratch in this exercise. If you are interested in trying to do this, you should use a copy of your original model. Create a new tabular model project and replace the code (view the code from Solution Explorer on the...