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 on transactional data

We are now going to create a model based on unprepared data. There are cases where building on the transactional system may be your best option due to business or other technical reasons. This allows you to build an analytics solution without necessarily building out a data warehouse. This process will use Power Query extensively to build out the solution.

We will start the process by adding another SSAS tabular project to our solution. Let's name this one WideWorldImportersPQ for Power Query. Let's get started on our new model:

  1. Add a new data source to the model. This time, we will be connecting to the transactional database we restored, WideWorldImporters.
  2. Next, we will import the tables. Right-click the data source and select Import New Tables. Here is the list of tables to select in the navigator: Application.TransactionTypes, Sales.CustomerCategories, Sales.Customers, and Sales.CustomerTransactions.
  3. Once...