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

Understanding the basics of DAX

One of the key differences in DAX is that it is used to build expressions and formulas, not traditional style queries. SQL works with tabular sets of data and MDX works with multidimensional sets. DAX was designed more like Excel functions. This works well when creating calculated measures and calculated columns. So, unlike MDX and SQL, there is no SELECT … FROM … WHERE structure. There are a few other concepts we need to review before we start creating calculations.

When working with DAX, you need to consider the context the function applies to. When creating calculated columns, the context is the row. You can use anything in the row to help build the column with DAX. Other functions apply to the table or just the column. When creating DAX calculations, you need to check the context to make sure you are using the function correctly.

Table names and field names use special syntax. Table names are typically enclosed in single quotes...